SwiftStack Releases OpenStack Swift Private Cloud Storage

SwiftStack announced the general availability of its OpenStack Swift-based private cloud storage offering. The company, which first made itself known earlier this year when it completed Series A funding, launched SwiftStack, a private cloud storage offering based on the OpenStack Swift object storage system.

According to the company, the SwiftStack system was developed to provide customers with integration and control to serve the growing demands of data-intensive applications. Joe Arnold, SwiftStack CEO, told Talkin' Cloud that the new object storage system fills a gap for developers, providing them with something easy to use, but also provides operators with a way to deploy and manage infrastructure.

"The first wave of this has been using the public cloud and using Amazon (AMZN) as a launchpad for these applications. The thing that we're seeing, though, or the reason why they're coming to us, is the cost of Amazon is too much," Arnold said in an interview prior to the general availability announcement.

Arnold claims his company can provide object storage that is similar to Amazon S3, but comes in at a quarter to a third of the price of the AWS service. Additionally, the system can be built in a customer's own data center, enabling private cloud for such customer organizations.

"People want control over their data," Arnold said. For a certain portion of the customer, that is definitely true. Well, maybe most (if not all) orgnaizations want control over their data, but how much control they really desire is where things differ from company to company.

It's in data-intensive applications that SwiftStack believes it can really make a difference. Arnold said the costs of Amazon are too high when it comes to data-intensive apps, and so SwiftStack is gearing up for that kind of competitive angle. The company has already signed on a large-scale gaming company, a sports broadcaster and a large-scale service provider.

Arnold noted the service provider customer makes it possible to build out a cloud storage offering for customers that is price-competitive. Additionally, the provider isn't tied to specific hardware or software; instead, they can pick and choose technology to get the best costs, he said.

"We've been working up the company for about two years now, and now customers are putting production data on us and they're paying us, and we have some very large customers who are trusting us with their data," Arnold said.

As for the channel, the company currently has one channel partner, but plans for the future will make the company more channel-centric. SwiftStack plans to launch a formal channel partner program later this year.