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SwiftInstall

Revision as of 18:00, 19 October 2010 by AnneGentle (talk)

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.

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 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. Finally, 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)

Please improve these instructions as you see fit.

Step 1: Set up the source code

Follow the source download instructions.

Step 2: Generate the ring files, add devices to the ring, and rebalance

You use the swift-ring-builder command line tool to build the ring. You can follow the all-in-one instructions to generate the data.

Step 3: Create configuration files for each server

{{:ConfigureSwift, , from="## Swift Config snippet"}}

Step 4: Start Swift

  1. Create a startup script, such as:
#!/bin/bash
swift-init auth-server start
swift-init proxy-server start
swift-init account-server start
swift-init container-server start
swift-init object-server start
  1. Give execute permissions for the files in /bin.