Towards a Community Cloud Storage

Community Clouds, usually built upon community networks, operate in a more disperse environment compared to a data center Cloud, with lower capacity and less reliable servers separated by a more heterogeneous and less predictable network interconnection. These differences raise challenges when deploying Cloud applications in a community Cloud. Open Stack Swift is an open source distributed storage system, which provides stand alone highly available and scalable storage from Open Stack Cloud computing components. Swift is initially designed as a backend storage system operating in a data center Cloud environment. In this work, we illustrate the performance and sensitivity of Open Stack Swift in a typical community Cloud setup. The evaluation of Swift is conducted in a simulated environment, using the most essential environment parameters that distinguish a community Cloud environment from a data center Cloud environment.