SwiftStack recently announced 1space, and I was lucky enough to snaffle some time with Joe Arnold to talk more about what it all means. I thought it would be useful to do a brief post, as I really do like SwiftStack, and I feel like I don’t spend enough time talking about them.

The Announcement

So what exactly is 1space? It’s basically SwiftStack delivering access to their storage across both on-premises and public cloud. But what does that mean? Well, you get some cool features as a result, including:

• Integrated multi-cloud access
• Scale-out & high-throughput data movement
• Highly reliable & available policy execution
• Policies for lifecycle, data protection & migration
• Optional, scale-out containers with AWS S3 support
• Native access in public cloud (direct to S3, GCS, etc.)
• Data created in public cloud accessible on-premises
• Native format enabling cloud-native services

[image courtesy of SwiftStack]

According to Arnold, one of the really cool things about this is that it “provides universal access to over both file protocols and object APIs to a single storage namespace, it is increasingly used for distributed workflows across multiple geographic regions and multiple clouds”.

Metadata Search

But wait …

One of the really nice things that SwiftStack has done is add integrated metadata search via a desktop client for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s called MetaSync.

Thoughts

This has been a somewhat brief post, but something I did want to focus on was the fact that this product has been open-sourced. SwiftStack have been pretty keen on open source as a concept, and I think that comes through when you have a look at some of their contributions to the community. These contributions shouldn’t be underestimated, and I think it’s important that we call out when vendors are contributing to the open source community. Let’s face it, a whole lot of startups are taking advantage of code generated by the open source community, and a number of them have the good sense to know that it’s most certainly a two-way street, and they can’t relentlessly pillage the community without it eventually falling apart.

But this announcement isn’t just me celebrating the contributions of neckbeards from within the vendor community and elsewhere. SwiftStack have delivered something that is really quite cool. In much the same way that storage types won’t shut up about NVMe over Fabrics, cloud folks are really quite enthusiastic about the concept of multi-cloud connectivity. There are a bunch of different use cases where it makes sense to leverage a universal namespace for your applications. If you’d like to see SwiftStack in action, check out this YouTube channel (there’s a good video about 1space here) and if you’d like to take SwiftStack for a spin, you can do that here.