Today, SwiftStack announces the finalization of $6.1 million in Series A funding in a round led by the Mayfield Fund with additional participation from Storm Ventures and UMC Capital. SwiftStack plans to use the funding to support product development for its software-defined storage solution as well as to expand its sales team and operations. SwiftStack delivers a software-defined storage solution that “decouples the management from the underlying storage infrastructure.” The resulting storage infrastructure is marked by greater scalability and durability than traditional storage solutions. Moreover, because SwiftStack’s solution is based on the storage component of OpenStack, customers can inter-operate with other vendors who use OpenStack-based storage. Navin Chaddha, Managing Director of the Mayfield Fund, remarked on the innovation of SwiftStack’s platform as follows:
SwiftStack is a great addition to our portfolio, which has included highly successful storage companies such as 3PAR and StorSimple. The company is uniquely positioned to be a frontrunner in the emerging software-defined storage market. With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams can leverage the power of the public cloud storage inside their own datacenter, kind of like Amazon S3-in-a-box.
Chaddha highlights the way in which SwiftStack brings the scalability, durability and flexibility of public cloud solutions directly to the datacenters of enterprises. Customers can leverage SwiftStack’s software-defined storage solution to create the public-cloud grade storage platform for use cases such as on premise deployments, private cloud environments and backup and recovery infrastructures. SwiftStack’s solution simplifies operational costs associated with maintaining storage infrastructures, particularly in the case of organizations that require the ability to scale rapidly and store and manage petabytes of data.
SwiftStack was founded by CEO Joe Arnold and COO Anders Tjernlund, both of whom are veterans of Engine Yard, the Platform as a Service for Ruby on Rails, PHP and Node.js applications. Moreover, because many of SwiftStack’s engineers are key contributors to the code for OpenStack’s Swift platform, the company’s technology is poised to remain tightly integrated with OpenStack’s evolving enhancements. Precise details of the SwiftStack platform have yet to be released, but for now, the company’s core message appears to be that OpenStack-based, public cloud grade storage infrastructures are commercially available via a software-defined storage solution that simplifies and enhances enterprise storage.
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