Intel® Solid State Drive with Intel® CAS Accelerating Swift* Whitepaper

Abstract Executive Summary

The explosive growth of unstructured data has resulted in the need to greatly expand safe and efficient storage. Enterprises and cloud service providers (CSPs) are transitioning to software-defined storage (SDS) solutions as a cost-effective way to meet the ever expanding storage demands. OpenStack Swift* is an SDS solution for public and private cloud storage, providing the scalability necessary to manage petabyte and beyond data growth.

As enterprises transition from traditional storage toward more open SDS solutions such as Swift*, and use commodity servers to control costs, quality of service and performance requirements continue to be critical. Utilizing a combination of Intel technologies can help significantly boost performance in a Swift* environment, enabling enterprises and CSPs to grow their business while continuing to meet demanding service-level agreements (SLAs).

The real world solution presented in this paper shows how an Intel® Solid State Drive (SSD) with intelligent caching software (based on I/O classification) can dramatically improve Swift* performance in a hybrid storage environment. This solution is a collaborative effort between SwiftStack and various Intel teams (Intel’s Software Solutions Group, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, and Intel Labs).