SwiftStack Host First Ever Python Hack Event

OpenStack continues to draw interest from the venture capital community, with SwiftStack Inc. raising $16 million on Monday to make the cloud operating system more attractive for ingesting the vast amounts of unstructured data pouring into the corporate network. The funding comes days after Mirantis Inc. closed a record-breaking $100 million round to drive the adoption of its OpenStack distro.

The three-year-old SwiftStack shares a similar back story as Inktank Inc., a startup founded by the developers of the Ceph open source storage service to commercialize their creation, which became part of Red Hat Inc. in a $175 million acquisition earlier this year. Both technologies offer to provide a programmable environment for distributing modern workloads such as media and text across commodity hard drives in a way that abstracts the messy details of the underlying hardware.

But whereas Ceph allows users to expose information to applications in different ways as the situation calls, Swift focuses exclusively on object storage, trading some of the flexibility afforded by its competitor’s approach for increased performance and availability. That combination makes it particularly well-suited for powering cloud services, a quality that has earned the project big-name users such as eBay Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and a number of other leading tech firms.

SwiftStack offers a commercial edition of the software that expands that value proposition to address the requirements of more traditional organizations. The company’s platform layers automation features over the core open-service project along with other value-added features such as the ability to distribute workloads across multiple geographic locations and support for popular user directories. The startup also offers a hosted version of its solution that allows customers to take advantage of its capabilities for short-term projects such as application testing without having to invest in additional hardware.

That has positioned SwiftStack as one of the pace-setters in the OpenStack ecosystem, a status that the new financing reinforces. The round was led by OpenView Partners, an expansion stage investor that counts eight-digit-plus exists such as ExactTarget Inc. and Mashery Inc. under its belt, with participation from existing backers Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures ventures and UMC Capital. The investment brings the startup’s total funding raised to a respectable $26 million.

SwiftStack plans to use the new capital to expand go-to-market and sales operations as part of its effort to secure a bigger chunk of the market for object storage, which Gartner Inc. estimates will pass $450 million by 2016 on the back of a 20 percent compound annual growth rate from 2012. OpenView operating partner Daniel Demmer, who boasts an extensive background in high-growth enterprise software companies, is joining the SwiftStack board as part of the investment.