Building Cost-Effective Storage Clouds – A Metrics-based Approach

There is a critical need, across various application classes such as archiving, backup of thousands of nodes in an organization, video sharing, Dropbox-like storage, etc., that requires highly reliable and scalable storage systems. In the new cloud world, these systems can be built fairly economically (and in house). So, the challenge is how to balance the cost and performance of building and operating such a storage system. The focus of this work is on proposing an effective solution and valuable observations for this challenge within the context of the OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) system.