Building out a well-rounded storage stack that provides the advanced functionality enterprise customers expect and demand is a uniquely difficult undertaking that only a handful of large vendors have truly succeeded in tackling thus far. The task is made challenging by the fact that there aren’t any shortcuts to the years of hard work and user feedback needed to put together a comprehensive package that delivers on the original value proposition, and is robust enough to avoid collapsing under the weight of all new requirements that keep piling up on top.

But the old rules don’t apply in the open-source community, where the pace of technological improvement is dictated not by any one vendor but an entire group of contributors working in tandem to move a project forward. The supporters of Swift are counting on that advantage to help them catch up to – and hopefully some day even surpass – the proprietary platforms that dominate the enterprise storage landscape today.

Swift is a core component of OpenStack used for keeping large swaths of highly varied data on cheap commodity hardware that provides a simple interface for applications to request and manipulate items.  The service exposes information as objects, an approach that hides the messy details of the physical blocks in which it’s kept, while doing away with the architectural limitations that make traditional file systems impractical for storing unstructured workloads such as video and text.

That functionality holds the promise to fundamentally change how companies manage and access their vast data troves, but CIOs have their feet firmly implanted in the present, and they can’t run their production environments on potential. Swift in its present form is not mature enough for traditional enterprises, but the latest stable release marks a decisive step in the right direction.

Swift 2.0 launched

The freshly launched Swift 2.0 brings with it what is being hailed as the single most significant update since the project’s inception: the addition of pre-baked management policies aimed at allowing large organizations and service providers to optimize their geographically distributed environments all the way down to individual applications.

One capability that stands out in particular is storage tiering, which the likes of IBM and HP have been offering for quite some time and makes it possible to automatically match specific workloads to the most appropriate media type. Now, Swift makes it possible to relegate frequently used “hot data” to flash for rapid access and store lower priority “cold data” stored on disk or tape to reduce costs all with minimal human intervention.

Another significant enhancement introduced with the latest release is the ability to fine-tune replication for each and every process running on the service instead of applying a single blanket policy across an entire cluster. That lays the groundwork for users to greatly trim the amount of duplicate data sitting around in their deployments, a major issue that is becoming more and more urgent as the amount of unstructured information flowing into the corporate networks continues to grow.

Last but certainly not least, the new version provides the option to map datasets to selected regions. This functionality is meant to eliminate the hassle factor in meeting data sovereignty requirements at large scale by making it possible for organizations to break the challenge down into distinct and isolated sectors that can be more easily managed individually.

All in all, Swift is much closer to production-readiness than it was last week, but there’s still a long way to go until it’s ready for enterprise primetime. Recognizing that, the initiative’s top corporate backers have already set to work on the next batch of features. The update is expected to release later this year and will reportedly include support for erasure coding, a method of storage protection that involves carving up datasets into smaller and more wieldy chunks that are spread across different destinations to achieve a degree of redundancy.

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