Enterprises and App Developers Have More Control as Swift Gains Storage Policies

Storage configuration is complex and unique to a specific project or use case — some applications require SDN while others require spinning media. Some users need triple data replication, while for others 2x will suffice.

Until now, it’s been difficult to reach that level of granularity with OpenStack’s Object Storage option, Swift. But users and operators who have been using Swift for scale-out storage on commodity hardware have asked for more control. Today, their voices have been heard.

In one of the biggest and most successful community efforts to date, the OpenStack Foundation is announcing the addition of storage policies to OpenStack Swift. The new feature will give enterprises and app developers more choice in the way they store, replicate, and access data across different backends and geographical regions.

“Users and operators in the OpenStack community are making a big impact on the development priorities of each new release,” said Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. “These critical refinements represent an increasing focus on software enhancements that make OpenStack more powerful for enterprise users and cloud operators.”

The new feature addition is all about increasing choice. With the new feature, users and operators can choose the storage hardware on which their data resides and which kind of replication policies make the most sense for their app or enterprise deployment.

For more information about how storage policies work and to get to know the story behind the community effort, see this talk from the Atlanta Summit given by John Dickinson of SwiftStack and Paul Luse of Intel.

The new features are available now from the open source repository and technology providers in the OpenStack Marketplace, and will be integrated into the next full release of the OpenStack software, Juno, for release in October 2014.

Image credit: "Storage Garage5" by Bryan Pearson