System RequirementsHardware: OpenStack Object Storage specifically is designed to run on commodity hardware.
Hardware Recommendations
Server Recommended Hardware Notes
Object Storage object servers Processor: dual quad coreMemory: 8 or 12 GB RAM Disk space: optimized for cost per GB Network: one 1 GB Network Interface Card (NIC) The amount of disk space depends on how much you can fit into the rack efficiently. You want to optimize these for best cost per GB while still getting industry-standard failure rates. At Rackspace, our storage servers are currently running fairly generic 4U servers with 24 2T SATA drives and 8 cores of processing power. RAID on the storage drives is not required and not recommended. Swift's disk usage pattern is the worst case possible for RAID, and performance degrades very quickly using RAID 5 or 6. As an example, Rackspace runs Cloud Files storage servers with 24 2T SATA drives and 8 cores of processing power. Most services support either a worker or concurrency value in the settings. This allows the services to make effective use of the cores available.
Object Storage container/account servers Processor: dual quad core Memory: 8 or 12 GB RAM Network: one 1 GB Network Interface Card (NIC) Optimized for IOPS due to tracking with SQLite databases.
Object Storage proxy server Processor: dual quad coreNetwork: one 1 GB Network Interface Card (NIC) Higher network throughput offers better performance for supporting many API requests. Optimize your proxy servers for best CPU performance. The Proxy Services are more CPU and network I/O intensive. If you are using 10g networking to the proxy, or are terminating SSL traffic at the proxy, greater CPU power will be required.
Operating System: OpenStack currently runs on Ubuntu and the large scale deployment at Rackspace runs on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Networking: 1000 Mbps are suggested. For OpenStack Object Storage, an external network should connect the outside world to the proxy servers, and the storage network is intended to be isolated on a private network or multiple private networks. Database: For OpenStack Object Storage, a SQLite database is part of the OpenStack Object Storage container and account management process. Permissions: You can install OpenStack Object Storage either as root or as a user with sudo permissions if you configure the sudoers file to enable all the permissions.