SwiftStack continues to broaden out from its object storage roots, with the addition of native file capability, which combined with their Cloud Sync feature, lets customers read and write to a single namespace, without a gateway, and to any cloud or on-prem location.
Joseph Arnold, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at SwiftStack
San Francisco-based SwiftStack has announced its SwiftStack 6 release. The company continues to deepen their multi-cloud data management capabilities, and with this release is making available cloud-native universal access for both object and file storage, eliminating the need for bolted-on gateways to achieve this capability.
SwiftStack began operations in 2011, as an object storage vendor focused on commercializing OpenStack Swift, providing the ability to stand up a service like Amazon S3 inside an enterprise data centre instead of the cloud, and storing the data on servers rather than in traditional storage. Over the last year, however, the company has broadened significantly beyond those roots into multi-cloud data management. Their last 5.x release, in October, enhanced their multi-cloud data management capabilities with multi-region erasure coding. and improvements to their Cloud Sync tool to allow syncing between different public clouds. Now their SwiftStack 6 ramps up the multi-cloud capabilities further, with a cloud-native, single namespace for unstructured data that provides integrated file and object access.
“There are two concepts here,” said Joseph Arnold, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at SwiftStack. “One is multi-cloud data management, and the other is universal access. What is now unique about SwiftStack is that it will satisfy customers who want file and object access to the same data, at the same time.”
“This is a bimodal approach for doing both file and object on the same data, inside the same workload,” said Don Jaworski, SwiftStack’s CEO. This ability to use both file and object storage, combined with SwiftStack Cloud Sync, allows policy-based data placement, where applications can run wherever IT deems the workload can run best.
Arnold said that this is a highly differentiated solution.
“What people have been doing is having a gateway solution for file access on top of the object platform, and they have to go in and out of the gateway to have access to the files,” he stated. “That having to go through the gateway to get access to the files has been the pain with existing gateway products. The customers also require applications that talk file system interfaces. With this, we had to build file system capabilities right into the core of the object storage system so it was friendly to both object and file.”
Don Jaworski, SwiftStack’s CEO
“This became a critical issue because when people run services in the cloud, they need to have easy access to them,” Jaworski said. “The Universal Access with Cloud Sync gives a single namespace to the data, so the applications that customers build won’t have to change. In addition, when we move data we keep it in native format, so they don’t need to go through a separate layer.”
This integrated file access lets both SMB and/or NFS file access protocols to read and write to the single namespace, without a gateway. The data can be read and written in both formats.
“It glues all the features together, so that customers can now start to think about having a workflow,” Arnold said. “With Cloud Sync they can also do this from any cloud location. The pain of going from on- premise to one cloud is the same as going from one cloud to another cloud, especially as different services get announced for the different clouds.”
“Our current object storage customer base that hasn’t been thinking multi-cloud can now add applications and leverage with this, so it strengthens our current value proposition and extends it to multi cloud,” Jaworski added. “At our booth at AWS re:Invent, we continually had people asking us how to move data between clouds even as they manage the clouds.”
