Improving OpenStack Swift interaction with the I/O stack to enable software defined storage

This paper analyses how OpenStack Swift, a distributed object storage service for a globally used middleware, interacts with the I/O subsystem through the Operating System. This interaction, which seems organised and clean on the middleware side, becomes disordered on the device side when using mechanical disk drives, due to the way threads are used internally to request data. We will show that only modifying the Swift threading model we achieve an 18% mean improvement in performance with objects larger than 512 KiB and obtain a similar performance with smaller objects. Compared to the original scenario, the performance obtained on both scenarios is obtained in a fair way: the bandwidth is shared equally between concurrently accessed objects. Moreover, this threading model allows us to apply techniques for Software Defined Storage (SDS). We show an implementation of a Bandwidth Differentiation technique that can control each data stream and that guarantees a high utilization of the device.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community under the IOStack (H2020-ICT-2014-7-1) project, by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the TIN2015-65316-P grant and by the Catalan Government under the 2014-SGR-1051 grant. To learn more about the IOStack H2020 project, please visit http:nnwww.iostack.eu.Peer Reviewe