Reliable and secure storage with Erasure Codes for OpenStack-Swift in PyECLib

Abstract

In the last decade, cloud storage systems has experienced a rapid growth to account for an important part of cloud-based services. Among them, OpenStack Swift is a open source software to implement an object storage system. Meanwhile, storage providers are making great effort to ensure the quality of their services. One of the key factors of storage systems is the data durability.

Fault tolerance mechanisms play an important role in ensuring the data availability. Existing approaches like replication and RAID are used to protect data from lost, while with their own drawbacks. Erasure coding comes as a novel concept applied in the storage systems for the concern of data availability. Studies showed that it is able to provide fault tolerance with redundancies while reducing the capacity overhead, offering a tradeoff between performance and cost.

This project did an in-depth investigation on the OpenStack Swift and the erasure coding approach. Analysis on erasure coded and replication systems are performed to compare the features of both approaches. A prototype of custom erasure code is implemented as an extension to Swift, offering data storage with promising reliability and performance.