The OpenStack Summit took place in San Antonio last week. OpenStack is an open source project primarily put together by RackSpace. The OpenStack Advisory Board actually has 9 seats. Six are currently taken by RackSpace, Citrix have one, and NASA have the other, and the seats taken seems to be related to the most code contributed.
The summit was well attended, perhaps over 300 people were there, which is heady stuff indeed for a project that is only several months in development.
The interest we have is on the storage side of OpenStack rather than the compute side, as we intend to provide support for the OpenStack Swift framework within our on-premise Cloud Gateway appliance and encompass the API’s into our own Cloud Storage API’s as we have with other cloud storage providers.
Swift is a sub project of OpenStack and provides a highly scalable redundant unstructured data store. Swift is 5 separate services, object, container, account, auth and proxy. Although each of these can be scaled separately, in practice they run together.
Never heard of Swift? it’s the underlying distributable object store that supports RackSpace Cloud Files. It’s akin to Amazon’s S3 implementation but unlike implementations such as Eucalyptus, which clone S3 API’s, but are not sponsored by Amazon, openStack and Swift has RackSpace firmly onboard, and have proven scale.
As Swift is used by Rackspace Cloud Files. Swift RackSpace claim it is production-ready code that is scalable to massive levels (100-petabyte clusters and 100000 requests per second). Swift sacrifices C for A and P from a CAP theorem perspective. Although most operations happen synchronously consistency is sacrificed in failure scenarios.
From our perspective we see enterprise users of our on-premise Cloud Gateway appliance expressing interest in SMEStorage supporting this. As with our S3 API endpoint support the gateway will overlay a more traditional file store on top of Swift layered with the business functionality we provide in our Organisation Cloud, virtual drives and clients for Mac, Windows and Linux, and rich mobile clients for iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, as well as value added features such as Webdav support.
If you are interested in Swift integration with our Cloud Gateway Appliance drop us an email.
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