Revision as of 23:29, 17 February 2013

Installing Object Storage (Swift)

You can provide cloud-based object storage for archival backups, content delivery networks (CDN), and more scalable, high-availability, high-performing storage use cases. Here's how to install it on Ubuntu/Debian, and there are additional notes on Fedora/RHEL as well.

Pre-requisites for Swift

Object Storage (Swift) is intended to run on commodity hardware, meaning any computers that run Linux or Windows typically will do. Generally we do not recommend RAID due to performance degradation since it doesn't match Swift's design well.

You can install Swift as a standalone single system, slice, or VM. This method ($which method?$) is typically reserved for development. You can install it in a lab environment or in a staging area. At Rackspace we have 36 storage nodes in staging. In addition, you can install Swift in your production environment.

The objects you intend to store need to be broken into chunks smaller than 5 GB. Support for larger files is in the works: https://code.launchpad.net/~gholt/swift/largefiles

Installing Swift (virtual machine)

You can install Swift with an all-in-one virtual machine by following instructions here: http://swift.openstack.org/development_saio.html.

Installing Swift (hardware)

You can install Swift with detailed instructions here: http://swift.openstack.org/howto_installmultinode.html.