[notmyname]

I'm going to lean towards swift, but then again, I'm a core dev for swift and I haven't played with riak/luwak.

Swift is ideal for storing static content (backups, web resources, documents). It's designed to be very scalable (both with concurrency and with total storage space). And it's designed to work with commodity hardware (read: cheap), so it handles failures well (ensuring that data is replicated and safe from bit rot). Also, swift has basic S3 compatibility support.

Please let me know if you have other, more specific questions, and I'll try to answer to the best I can.

[shedam]

thank you very much for your answer. I have several question : can we mix node with different storage capacities (for example when we add new node later)? Is this kind of storage really cheaper than Nas with RAID on "small" capacity like 40 or 60TB total space? Ok hardware is cheaper, but what about other cost like power consumption or cooling?

[notmyname]

Power consumption and cooling will, of course, be very dependent on your chosen hardware and hosting (DC).

Yes, swift can handle heterogenous drive sizes. For example, you can start with 2T drives and start adding 3T drives when they become more cost effective. You initial 40-60TB is well within reason for a swift cluster. I know of several running clusters at much larger scale than that (PBs of data, billions of objects).

Cost consideration are also highly dependent on your particular hardware choice. We recommend that you optimize your hardware for price per GB rather than for IOps or RAM or CPU. As you can imagine, there are nuances to all of this, too.

In case you haven't seen it yet, all the auto-generated docs for swift are at http://swift.openstack.org and much help can be found in #openstack on freenode IRC.

I'd recommend that you first look at the swift all-in-one docs (http://swift.openstack.org/development_saio.html) for running an entire cluster in a single VM. It should give you a good feel of the different parts of the system.