Re:How to: Compete with Amazon S3 without Buying Hardware
by wmf on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:36PM
(#3901337)
Aren't most Swift providers already using 2x-3x duplication? Putting parity on top of that would be like RAID15 (the reason you've never heard of RAID15 is that it would be crazy expensive).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:How to: Compete with Amazon S3 without Buying Hardware
by notmyname on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:48PM
(#3901364)
Yes, swift provides multiple redundant copies of the data. It depends on what you are protecting against: failure of a piece of your data or failure of a hosting provider.
If you simply rely on "dumb disks" spread across multiple providers to provide availability, then you may be interested in looking at the nova-volumes part of openstack (it provides block storage attached to nova VMs). As part of openstack, it's an open system that is seeing rapid adoption.
However, one of the most-requested features for swift is to provide support for logical clusters that span a wide geographic area. This could potentially allow multiple providers to collaborate in providing a multi-provider storage system. However, I'd guess that the technical problems are much simpler than the business problems in setting up multi-provider clusters.