SwiftStack, the leader in multi-cloud data management, announced major enhancements to its platform, offering new capabilities for multi-cloud use cases and simplifying workflows spanning both private data centers and public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. These new capabilities have been contributed to the open source community in the newly created 1space project.
SwiftStack software adds new data migration capabilities, new ways to apply policies so data is stored in the appropriate location, and enhanced search options for end users who need access to data. Because SwiftStack 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.
Now, SwiftStack enables live migration of applications and data between private or public clouds. The single multi-cloud namespace allows the migration to be transparent to the application and it utilizes all bandwidth across the cluster to move data quickly.
SwiftStack has enhanced its policy engine that manages data across its entire lifecycle in multi-cloud deployments. By controlling policies, administrators ensure data is automatically placed in the optimal location for compute, analytics, access to external clients or third parties, or for low-cost archive. As the value of data changes, its location can change, while remaining within the single namespace.
“Because SwiftStack presents a single namespace across private and public infrastructure, it greatly simplifies access to data,” said†Jeffrey Tratner, Technical Lead, Scientific Computing at Counsyl, which uses SwiftStack in their genomic data sequencing pipeline. “A single API endpoint can be used by application developers and researchers when they access their data. No applications need to change as the infrastructure team creates policies that will move data from on-premises to the public cloud.” A detailed case study of Counsyl’s use of SwiftStackis can be found†here.
“Organizations are actively looking for ways to use all the capabilities of public clouds, especially for data created on-premises,” said†Don Jaworski, CEO of SwiftStack. “These product and technology innovations help workflows span both private and public infrastructure, where data is automatically placed via policy where applications can best utilize it. Getting your data on cloud-native infrastructure is a key first step in realizing multi-cloud.”
The technology at the core of SwiftStack’s multi-cloud capabilities highlighted above have been contributed to the new open-source 1space project. The charter of 1space is to connect data namespaces across multiple private and public clouds. It enables multi-cloud data placement and access capabilities in SwiftStack and supports both the S3 and Swift APIs.
1space is SwiftStack’s third major†contribution to the open-source community. SwiftStack’s primary contributions to date have been leading the Swift object storage project, which has evolved into the default open-source object storage technology for files, videos, analytics data, web content, backups, images, virtual machine snapshots, and other unstructured data. Its second contribution, ProxyFS, natively adds file services to Swift to support classic applications that cannot be modified to use object APIs. ProxyFS enables a true multi-cloud filesystem, and greatly reduces the need for filesystem gateways that can create bottlenecks and add complexity.
“When data is managed using open-source technologies and accessed using open instead of proprietary protocols, organizations maintain ultimate control over their data,” said SwiftStack founder and chief product officer†Joe Arnold. “At our core, SwiftStack is a member of a broader collaborative community, and we are proud to bring two new technology stacks to our colleagues.”
1space are available now on†GitHub.
