Yes, swift provides multiple redundant copies of the data. It depends on what you are protecting against: failure of a piece of your data or failure of a hostin

Yes, swift provides multiple redundant copies of the data. It depends on what you are protecting against: failure of a piece of your data or failure of a hosting provider. If you simply rely on "dumb disks" spread across multiple providers to provide availability, then you may be interested in looking at the nova-volumes part of openstack (it provides block storage attached to nova VMs). As part of openstack, it's an open system that is seeing rapid adoption. However, one of the most-requested features for swift is to provide support for logical clusters that span a wide geographic area. This could potentially allow multiple providers to collaborate in providing a multi-provider storage system. However, I'd guess that the technical problems are much simpler than the business problems in setting up multi-provider clusters.