System requirements

Hardware: OpenStack Object Storage is designed to run on commodity hardware.

[Note]Note

When you install only the Object Storage and Identity Service, you cannot use the dashboard unless you also install Compute and the Image Service.

Table 8.1. Hardware recommendations
Server Recommended Hardware Notes

Object Storage object servers

Processor: dual quad core

Memory: 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 core

Network: 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 10 GB networking to the proxy, or are terminating SSL traffic at the proxy, greater CPU power is required.

Operating system: OpenStack Object Storage currently runs on Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, openSUSE, or SLES.

Networking: 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps is suggested internally. 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.

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