1space is also a new open source project, and is joined as new SwiftStack open source endeavours by MetaSync, which like 1space, also brings new multi-cloud technologies to the open source community.
Joe Arnold, SwiftStack’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer
Multi-cloud data management vendor SwiftStack has announced new data migration capabilities with the launch of SwiftStack 1space, which connects data namespaces across multiple private and public clouds and opens up new multi-cloud use cases. They also announced MetaSync, which provides a single index of all unstructured data across multiple clouds. Both 1space and MetaSync are new open source projects as well.
In the last year, SwiftStack which was formed in 2011 to commercialize OpenStack Swift, has aggressively repositioned itself from an object storage vendor to a multi-cloud data management provider, and has beefed up their capabilities to enable workload portability between on-prem and the cloud, including the development of a native, single namespace for unstructured data that provides integrated file and object access.
“Its all about building a multi-cloud storage system that can reduce friction and lifecycle data,” said Joe Arnold, SwiftStack’s Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer. “As data footprints grow, the value people want to get out of them are ever-expanding. Gaming companies, as an example, do incredible amounts of analytics on their data to optimize their games With multi-cloud, we have been seeing with MapReduce, Kubernetes and containerization, people building apps to make the data more portable. Actually moving the data remains a challenge, however. And how do you search across these siloes?”
SwiftStack 1space is designed to address these issues.
“SwiftStack 1space, which is now also an open source project, creates a single namespace between cloud storage locations, so that you can go from Cloud A to Cloud B and still have access to the same data,” Arnold said. “It’s portable from one cloud to another. This allows us to then lifecycle the data transparently, and do live migration. Before, an application would need to talk to both data sets. Now, at any point, the application can move.”
This will be an enormous advantage in cloudbursting, Arnold stressed.
“Why move your data unless you need to? This gives users full access to the data as they do cloudbursting. It also enables you to set policies for data protection, in addition for migration and lifecycle management.”
SwiftStack 1space works by being integrated into the SwiftStack storage stack.
“It’s not a separate system,” Arnold said. “It’s embedded into the storage infrastructure in the public cloud with the data stored in its native format, so that the work done to move data is distributed in a highly available way. It’s all very reliable. You can also use containers in that single name space. You just connect to the SwiftStack Connector to make data accessible in that single namespace.”
Arnold cited Counsyl, a SwiftStack reference customer that does genetic screening, who use SwiftStack in their genomic data sequencing pipeline.
“SwiftStack 1space lets them easily push data off to an AWS environment,” Arnold said.
SwiftStack has also added new search capabilities to find and access data, through search by names and by metadata within the namespace, whether it is on-premise or in the public cloud.
“This is MetaSync, which we have also open sourced,” Arnold said. “It provides a sophisticated way to search metadata, Google style, to easily find things even in huge volumes of data.”
Also on the open source front, SwiftStack announced the June 2018 2.18 release of Swift Object Storage.
“This is the biggest release ever of the Swift open source project,” Arnold said. “It adds AWS S3 API integration with OpenStack Swift, as well as the capability to have an unlimited number of objects per bucket. It’s a very exciting release for us.”
For channel partners, Arnold said that 1space will be the main cause for excitement, however.
“The other things are nice, but 1space unlocks new uses for the cloud,” he said. “Their customers are looking to adopt cloud, and resellers know that they will be either be part of that transition or be left out. This lets them be part of the solution. They can do more business by providing paths to the cloud than by creating walls around infrastructure. There’s value you can create as an infrastructure provider to give customers flexibility, and 1space does this on the data side.”
1Space and MetaSync are available now on GitHub.
