A zone is a group of nodes that is as isolated as possible from other nodes (separate servers, network, power, and geography). A Swift ring function similar to a cereal box decoder ring, allowing the Swift services to locate each object. The ring guarantees that every replica is stored in a separate zone. To increase the capacity of our environment, we can add an extra zone to which data will then be replicated. In this example, we will add an extra storage node with 172.16.0.212 as its IP address and /dev/sdb as its second disk. This node will be used for our OpenStack Object Storage. This node makes up the only node in this zone.

To add additional capacity to existing zones, we repeat the instructions for each existing zone in our cluster. For example, the following steps assume that zone 5 (z5) does not exist, so this gets created when we build the rings. To simply add additional capacity to existing zones, we specify the new servers in the existing...