Welcome to the documentation for using the SURF Object Store service which is based on Openstack SWIFT. The information on these pages will help you get started with Object Store and SWIFT. We welcome your comments at our Servicedesk Portal or your contribution to help us improve the documentation.

About Swift

There is a growing demand for general purpose Online Storage capabilities that may be used for the storage of large quantities of unstructured data in a shared multi-tenant environment. SURF’s Openstack SWIFT storage cluster is an all round online cloud storage system which can meet this demand and that is characterised by its scalability, durability and availability. SWIFT is ideal for storing unstructured data that can grow without bound.

Openstack SWIFT will provide apart from it’s own native protocol also the S3 protocol, which is the defacto standard for addressing object storage. The S3 REST API was developed by Amazon for providing access on their cloud storage system. This opens up a wealth of possibilities for this storage system.

SWIFT is an object storage system which means that it does not have a directory-type structure like a normal file system has but it organises its data in so-called containers that contain objects. There is no tree-like structure with files and directories. There are only containers with objects in them.