SwiftStack Empowers Backup and Recovery Applications With Breed of Object Storage

SwiftStack,Inc. announced that backup applications are unlocking incremental value by using company’s Object Storage as a storage target for data protection.

When used with SwiftStack, backup applications enable enterprises to benefit from improved archiving and retention, the elimination of vendor lock in to align cost with business requirements, and shortened backup windows by capitalizing on a scale-out architecture that can accept very high parallel I/O.

“With the emergence of the 3rd platform, enterprises need backup and recovery that not only delivers high performance but also the cost predictability, simplicity and greater policy control necessary to improve TCO and assure compliance,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, storage systems, IDC. “A new breed of object storage, such as SwiftStack, is giving rise to backup architectures for applications such as Trilio Data that will solve these challenges with the flexibility organizations want to ensure long term agility.“

SwiftStack has optimized its object storage to deliver exponential value for backup and recovery applications that natively support OpenStack Swift as a backup target or any backup application that can use a Filesystem Gateway. With OpenStack Swift at its core, SwiftStack is an open source solution for object storage giving its users simplicity, expanded integrations and the freedom of choice to work with the vendors and platforms that are best for their environment.

By using SwiftStack for backup and recovery applications, enterprises benefit from:

• Improved archiving and retention – company’s policy-based management enables the migration of inactive data sets to object storage while the shrinking archive footprint up to 70%

• Elimination of vendor lock-in – SwiftStack leverages the built-in deduplication and compression engines of the backup application and enables backup operations to run on any standard server. As a result, data is portable, with the ability to easily move it without restrictions

• Shorter backup Windows – Scale-out architecture uses a tier of ingest servers that scale independently and accept very high parallel I/O. It also enables remote sites to backup locally, with automatic replication of data to a primary site

• Consolidated storage silos – Object storage has a single unified namespace within and across data centers so backup storage targets do not need to be spread across multiple silos

• Architecturally superior TCO – SwiftStack leverages standard, cost-effective hardware and offers built-in DR for greater storage efficiency. By supporting modern backup applications, it also eliminates lock in to proprietary deduplication appliances.

Company’s object storage is offering that is optimized to store OpenStack Nova VM images using Glance, as well as snapshots from OpenStack Cinder and OpenStack Trove. With the rise of shared-nothing architectures like NoSQL, backup solutions for open source databases including Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL need backup storage that is scalable and open.

“The combination of SwiftStack and Trilio Data’s Business Assurance Platform empowers organizations to achieve unprecedented backup and recovery performance and complete data assurance in OpenStack and any environment leveraging big data applications such as Cassandra and MongoDB,” said David S. Safaii, CEO, Trilio Data, Inc. “The SwiftStack scale-out architecture dynamically scales to support storing backups for these scale-out workloads, not only delivering true business assurance but greater management simplicity and platform flexibility.”

The benefits of company’s object storage are also available to enterprise backup applications that support the Swift API, including Commvault Simpana.

“After pointing our Commvault Simpana backups to SwiftStack, we have seen big improvements in cost, performance and offsite protection,” said Jim Merritt, sr. systems administrator, Burton Snowboards. “Our new backup storage tier also enables us to consolidate hundreds of Terabytes of user file shares, which will also be protected by the multi-site replication offered by SwiftStack.“

“When used as storage for backup applications, SwiftStack offers an architecture that is both more capable and lower cost compared to other on-premises storage options or public cloud storage,” said Joe Arnold, president and chief product officer, SwiftStack. “We are excited to see so many software vendors supporting the Swift API so that their customers can take advantage of a new breed of backup storage with built-in offsite data protection.“