San Francisco-based SwiftStack today announced the general availability of its private cloud storage product.  The OpenStack based product offers an object storage system for the enterprise.  After hitting the scene earlier this year, SwiftStack  emerged with their initial Series A funding announcement and their game plan to deliver robust storage to meet the demands of present day and future data-intensive applications.

SwiftStack is heading for some competitive waters to say the least.  In a discussion with SwiftStack CEO Joe Arnold, he mentions among other things that not only is this product enabling development with user-friendly built-in features, but it’s also getting picked up by those that are managing the environments as well.  SwiftStack enters the fray where they’re competing with Amazon, where customers have looked at their application platform and the associated Amazon storage costs and found that the costs were painful.  SwiftStack offers them a significant cost-advantage and that’s because of the open architecture.  SwiftStack is free of being locked into software or hardware, instead they are able to select options that give them a cost advantage while still meeting their performance requirements.

“The shift to cloud-based applications has created high expectations among users in terms of data access. They expect data to be highly available to them on multiple devices, and data centers need to cater to these demands,” said Joe Arnold, CEO, SwiftStack. “While there are public cloud products available to address these challenges, we found a greater need in the private cloud market, which is why we created SwiftStack as a reliable, highly-scalable storage system. Our approach helps enterprises harness the storage power of a public cloud on commodity hardware in their data centers.”

This private cloud option delivers a whole stack of opportunities.  SwiftStack’s system is rich with enterprise features.  The system is built of two parts that together form a software-defined architecture.  Storage intelligence is decoupled from the hardware and this modular SDS nature is what makes the system so flexible and capable. The first part is the integrated stack that is designed for turnkey deployment, the SwiftStack Node.  SwiftStack Nodes feature all the geo-redundant, geo-tactical clustering, load balancing, management, and high-speed features you would want from your enterprise storage.  The second part is the SwiftStack Controller – these controllers are what gives the storage an enterprise advantage.  It is able to be deployed from a cloud-hosted environment, or as is now readily available, it can run on-site in your own data center.  From the Controller, you can set complete management, deployment, and automation of your private cloud storage.  It features APIs that make it easy to integrate into your existing data center as well.  This approach means fast deployment and management of private cloud storage that is extensible into any number of environments.  It is designed for scale, flexibility, and continuity.

So with SwiftStack you have this next-generation, ready-built, rapid-deployment, cloud-feature, software-defined storage environment that you can just roll into your data center.  It runs on commodity hardware and has incredible advantages over legacy storage systems.   SwiftStack puts this product in the hands of customers easily with a 30-day free trial.  Customers are coming through the door quickly, so I expect with such a compelling product along with the savings that the company will thrive with this product.  It’s big news and storage has seen a lot of activity in recent industry happenings as the scale of data just keeps on going up.