by irrlab
Coverage of OpenStack Summit:
“The OpenStack Summit started in San Diego today. Mark Collier announced during the kickoff meeting that there are over 1,300 people registered at the conference. As a result, lines for lunch were a bit slower than we wished. We’re coordinating solutions with the hotel to improve the situation. There will be also more power strips in the Developer’s Lounge area…”
http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/10/openstack-community-weekly-newsletter-oct-12-19/
by irrlab
“One of the requirements for data center security is protection of “at rest” data. Usually this protection is about encrypting client-generated contents, including objects stored in the Swift cluster. In most cases, clients themselves could carefully encrypt their data; however, this requires the client to establish and support encryption infrastructure. A cloud provider can create value by offering transparent server-side on-disk encryption.
We have been working on this design as a part of our current engagement with Cisco Webex. Their requirements include encryption of data stored on Swift devices, and clear separation of code to simplify code base maintenance. These are the requirements we aim to address with our proposal at the forthcoming OpenStack design conference for the forthcoming Grizzly release of OpenStack…”
http://www.mirantis.com/blog/openstack-swift-encryption-architecture/
by irrlab
“Many people confuse object storage with block-level storage such as iSCSI or FibreChannel (SAN), but there is a great deal of difference between them. While SAN exposes only block devices to the system (the /dev/sdb linux device name is a good example), object storage can be accessed only with a specialized client app (e.g., the box.com client app).
Block storage is an important part of cloud infrastructure. Its main use cases are storing images for virtual machines or storing a user’s files (e.g., backups of all sorts, documents, pictures). The main advantage of object storage is very low implementation cost compared to enterprise-grade storage, while ensuring scalability and data redundancy. There seem to be a couple of widely recognizable implementations of object storage. Here we’ll compare two of them that can be interfaced with OpenStack…”
http://www.mirantis.com/blog/object-storage-openstack-cloud-swift-ceph/
by irrlab
“The OpenStack Swift project has been developing at a tremendous pace. The version 1.6.0 was released in August followed by 1.7.4 (Folsom) just after two months! In these two recent releases, many important features have also been implemented, for example the optimization for using SSD, object versioning, StatsD logging and much more – many of these features have significant implications for performance planning for the cloud builders and operators.
As an integral part of deploying a cloud storage platform based on OpenStack Swift, benchmarking a Swift cluster implementation is essential before the cluster is deployed for production use. Preferably the benchmark should simulate the eventual workload that the cluster will be subjected to.
In this blog, we discuss following Swift benchmarking concepts:
(1) Benchmark Dimensions for Swift cluster: performance, scalability and degraded-mode performance (e.g. when hardware and software failures happen).
(2) Sample workloads for Swift cluster…”
by irrlab
“There has been a ton of activity in and around Swift throughout the Folsom release cycle. Swift has moved from version 1.4.8 in the Essex release to version 1.7.4 in the Folsom release. Some of the new features added in the Folsom release include the integration of Keystone middleware, the separation of the Swift CLI and client library so Glance can more easily integrate with Swift to store Nova images.
Swift has also added many new features to its core storage engine. Below I’ve described what I think are the three most significant new features in Swift in the Folsom release…”
http://swiftstack.com/blog/2012/09/27/top-three-swift-features-in-openstack-folsom/
by irrlab
“As a core contributor to Swift, SwiftStack is keenly interested in pushing forward the development of Swift, specifically to enable Swift to support geographically distributed clusters. We got started on this development in the 1.5 release of Swift and are now continuing this work, which will be made available in upcoming releases of Swift. This overview details a design for this feature. We are also looking forward to discussing this in the upcoming OpenStack Summit in October…”
http://swiftstack.com/blog/2012/09/16/globally-distributed-openstack-swift-cluster/
“Swift is the software behind the OpenStack Object Storage service. This service provides a simple storage service for applications using RESTful interfaces, providing maximum data availability and storage capacity. I explain here how some parts of the storage and replication in Swift works, and show some of its current limitations. If you don’t know Swift and want to read a more “shallow” overview first, you can read John Dickinson’s Swift Tech Overview…”
http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2012/openstack-swift-consistency-analysis
