Things are looking bright for SwiftStack as the rapid growth in unstructured information continues to drive the adoption of object storage, a new paradigm for managing data that is moving into the enterprise mainstream with OpenStack. The San Francisco-based startup is a core contributor to the project, and commercializes it with an on-premise controller that decouples capacity from the underlying infrastructure to deliver cloud capabilities behind the firewall.

SwiftStack chief operating officer Anders Tjernlund sees demand for object storage increasing over the next 12 months thanks to a combination of factors, including the rise of next generation apps architected for efficiency at scale. Modern workloads are quickly outgrowing legacy file systems and storage arrays, he explains, which is driving more and more companies to abandon proprietary solutions for open source software and commodity hardware. This shift in demand gives SwiftStack an edge over slower moving rivals like EMC and NetApp, which are trying to differentiate on cost and functionality without eroding their margins.

A maturing ecosystem: achieving economy of scale

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“Once dismissed by their proprietary competitors as ‘immature,’ open source operating systems, middleware, application frameworks, and databases are now standards in enterprise and Web infrastructure. In fact, the open source model has so completely and fundamentally transformed the infrastructure tier in the data center that not many proprietary infrastructure platform technologies have a sustainable advantage any longer. That same transformation is now changing the storage tier, one organization at a time,” according to Tjernlund.

Such transformation is a long term goal for many IT departments in the enterprise, looking more like the popular public cloud in terms of efficiency and achieving economy of scale.  Open source and a supportive ecosystem have pushed this trend along, enabling the enterprise with developing standards while lowering costs.  This, says Tjernlund, is how the enterprise is rethinking IT architecture and leveraging software-led systems to provide competitive products that are beginning to take on hyperscale leaders like AWS.

“The big operators have proven that open source software on standard hardware can deliver the highest level of service while also lowering the cost of infrastructure,” says Tjernlund. “While most enterprises do not have the staff resources to build their own products from open source, they can use the same approach of standard hardware using new software defined infrastructure offerings that package open source in a consumable solution.

OpenStack helping enterprises look more like the public cloud

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SwiftStack is positioning itself at the forefront of this trend by taking an active role in the OpenStack ecosystem, which the executive describes as having an “exceptional developer community and focus.” He expects that more enterprise features like storage policies and erasure coding will be added to the platform as it continues to mature in 2014 and beyond.

“OpenStack Swift provides object storage for unstructured data, is accessible via HTTP, and operates like Amazon S3 and other public cloud storage offerings,” Tjernlund concludes. “Swift is proven as the engine that runs the world’s largest storage clouds, and is openly available for use in an enterprise as a private cloud technology.”

Contributors: Maria Deutscher