openstack-manuals/doc/common/section_about-object-storage.xml
Rhys Oxenham c5aaf5424c Updated: About OpenStack Object Storage Document
One of the TODO entries was to provide a more comprehensive overview
of Object Storage/Swift than was already written. This is a first
attempt at making it better.

This patch also uncomments a line within the 'admin-guide-cloud' book
that doesn't reference the common 'about-object-storage' page like others
do. I've reverted this and tested thoroughly, not sure why this was there.

In addition, I updated a few other pages where they lacked certain
clarity. For example- the 'Getting Started' page provided only a very
basic overview of the components and without going into too much detail
I added further information. There were also a few English syntax changes
throughout some of the other pages.

Change-Id: I1952d9e1882fc962320304759110a2ccbc50de82
backport: havana
2013-12-14 13:08:33 +00:00

32 lines
1.8 KiB
XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
version="5.0"
xml:id="ch_introduction-to-openstack-object-storage">
<title>Introduction to Object Storage</title>
<para>Object Storage is a robust, highly scalable and
fault tolerant storage platform for unstructured data
such as objects. Objects are stored bits, accessed
through a RESTful, HTTP-based interface. You cannot access
data at the block or file level. Object Storage is commonly
used to archive and back up data, with use cases in
virtual machine image, photo, video and music storage.</para>
<para>Object Storage provides a high degree of availability, throughput,
and performance with its scale out architecture. Each object is
replicated across multiple servers, residing within the
same data center or across data centers, which mitigates the risk
of network and hardware failure. In the event of hardware failure,
Object Storage will automatically copy objects to a new location
to ensure that there are always three copies available.
Object Storage is an eventually consistent distributed storage
platform; it sacrifices consistency for maximum
availability and partition tolerance. Object Storage enables you to
create a reliable platform by using commodity hardware and
inexpensive storage.</para>
<para>For more information, review the key concepts
in the developer documentation at <link
xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/"
>docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/</link>.</para>
</section>