Exposing the Truth About OpenStack Cloud Deployments
When it comes to making the move to object storage these days, IT organizations are in a bit of a quandary. In theory at least, most of them would prefer to make use of industry standards such as OpenStack to access object storage systems in a private cloud. In reality, large numbers of them are already making use of object storage via the S3 cloud service provided by Amazon Web Services.
At the OpenStack Summit Tokyo conference today, SwiftStack moved to address that issue by enhancing the support for S3 application programming interfaces (APIs) emulation it now provides in version 3.0 of its namesake object storage software.
Joe Arnold, president and chief product officer for SwiftStack, says S3 support will make it simpler to deploy object storage within a hybrid cloud that needs to include the S3 service from AWS. Given the popularity of AWS in the cloud, Arnold says many IT organizations will need to “repatriate” data from the AWS service back to private clouds that may be running on premise or in a hosting facility.
Arnold says version 3.0 of SwiftStack also provides access to policies for managed replication and erasure codes as well as a controller that adds support for Microsoft Active Directory and the ability to communicate directly with a secondary controller.
While object storage technologies have been around for a while now, the increased variety of data that needs to be stored is finally pushing enterprise IT organizations to embrace object storage. At the same time, Arnold notes that most cloud service providers have already made the switch to object storage. In the pursuit of any hybrid cloud computing strategy, Arnold says it’s now apparent that those IT organizations will need to be able to access both S3 and OpenStack Swift APIs as they continue to move into private cloud waters that are still relatively uncharted territory.
