“SwiftStack is a great addition to our portfolio, which has included highly successful storage companies such as 3PAR and StorSimple. The company is uniquely positioned to be a frontrunner in the emerging software-defined storage market,” said Navin Chaddha, managing director, Mayfield Fund. “With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams can leverage the power of the public cloud storage inside their own datacenter, kind of like Amazon S3-in-a-box.”

In a briefing with CEO Joe Arnold, we discussed the technology and business value. SwiftStack’s OpenStack-based software is designed to run on hardware inside a company’s data center and provide functionality similar to Amazon’s S3 public-cloud storage. That’s the short version, but the technology is exceedingly flexible, able to run in a number of enterprise scenarios. SwiftStack’s platform is designed to transform standard IT storage into enterprise-grade data storage, with sophisticated features and management.  The conversation hinted to much more innovation to come in the near future.

SwiftStack is building a software-defined storage solution specifically for object storage. The platform decouples the management from the underlying storage infrastructure, enabling customers to build pools of storage on commodity hardware. As a result, they are able to achieve greater scale, more flexibility and higher durability. SwiftStack’s storage system helps organizations with considerable amounts of data simplify operations to reduce overall operational costs.

The software-defined storage stories are only heating up. A few weeks ago, we reported on Nexenta’s $24 million dollar funding.  Going a little further back, Virsto was acquired by VMware.  Infrastructure as code, Storage as code – these concepts are maturing into enterprise business solutions in a significant and growing trend. Venture capital sees it and is all over it.