I haven’t covered SwiftStack in a little while, and they’ve been doing some pretty interesting stuff. They made some announcements recently but a number of scheduling “challenges” and some hectic day job commitments prevented me from speaking to them until just recently. In the end I was lucky enough to snaffle 30 minutes with Mario Blandini and he kindly took me through the latest news.

6.0 Then, So What?

Universal Access

Universal Access is really very cool. Think of it as a way to write data in either file or object format, and then read it back in file or object format, depending on how you need to consume it.

[image courtesy of SwiftStack]

Key features include:

• Gateway free – the data is stored in cloud-native format in a single namespace;
• Accessible via file (SMB3 / NFS4) and / or object API (S3 / Swift). Note that this is not a replacement for NAS, but it will give you the ability to work with some of those applications that expect to see file in places; and
• Applications can write data one way, access the data another way, and vice versa.

The great thing is that, according to SwiftStack, “Universal Access enables applications to take advantage of all data under management, no matter how it was written or where it is stored, without the need to refactor applications”.

Universal Access Multi-Cloud

So what if you take to really neat features like, say, Cloud Sync and Universal Access, and combine them? You get access to a single, multi-cloud, storage namespace.

[image courtesy of SwiftStack]

Thoughts

As Mario took me through the announcements he mentioned that SwiftStack are “not just an object storage thing based on Swift” and I thought that was spot on. Universal Access (particularly with multi-cloud) is just the type of solution that enterprises looking to add mobility to workloads are looking for. The problem for some time has been that data gets tied up in silos based on the protocol that a controller speaks, rather than the value of the data to the business. Products like this go a long way towards relieving some of the pressure on enterprises by enabling simpler access to more data. Being able to spread it across on-premises and public cloud locations also makes for simpler consumption models and can help business leverage the data in a more useful way than was previously possible. Add in the usefulness of something like Cloud Sync in terms of archiving data to public cloud buckets and you’ll start to see that these guys are onto something. I recommend you head over to the SwiftStack site and request a demo. You can read the press release here.