Category: SwiftStack

SwiftStack Announces General Availability Of Software Defined Storage Solution For Private Clouds

Today, SwiftStack announces the general availability of its private cloud storage platform that leverages OpenStack’s Swift as its underlying storage technology. The solution delivers storage performance and scalability for private clouds that parallels that of public cloud offerings. Designed to run on commodity hardware, the solution is currently used primarily by organizations building applications within a private cloud environment as well as cloud service providers that use SwiftStack’s storage solution for their cloud offerings. SwiftStack’s software defined storage solution features two principal components: (1) Nodes that receive the storage configuration from the controller and adjust the platform in accord with authentication and load balancing changes; (2) A controller that manages and automates the configuration, scaling and error handling.

Developed by the team responsible for key contributions to OpenStack Swift, SwiftStack represents yet another commercialization of OpenStack’s offerings, this time in the form of a robust, object storage solution designed specifically for private clouds. Today’s announcement also signals the vibrancy of a contemporary revolution in storage technologies branded under the widely misunderstood rubric “software defined storage,” at least partially defined by the ability of the storage controller to “be provision-able via software orchestration” according to Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix, another software defined storage vendor. Another key component of software defined storage is the abstraction of storage from hardware, and the capability of the controller to be virtually provisioned. Other vendors in the software defined storage space include Nexenta and EMC’s recent acquisition ScaleIO. As large enterprises struggle to catch up with advances in storage technology, the industry should expect to see more acquisitions of hot software defined storage vendors as the battle to deliver highly scalable, high performance, interoperable storage solutions evolves.

SwiftStack Raises $6.1 Million In Series A Funding For OpenStack-Based Software Defined Storage Solution

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.