26% of Enterprise IT Professionals Using Object Storage in Production – SwiftStack

SwiftStack, Inc., in object storage for enterprises, announced that its Object Storage platform is enabling enterprise customers to realize SwiftStack’s bold vision for the datacenter – genuine simplicity, cost certainty and scalability – contrasted with legacy, hardware-based storage solutions that are both complex and expensive.

This ‘New Breed’ of Object Storage provides enterprises the cost-effective scalability of the cloud while allowing IT strategists to avoid vendor lock-in and achieve freedom of choice in the datacenter.

In a recent study, The State of Object Storage in the Private Cloud, enterprise IT professionals expressed that they are actively using object storage in their datacenter. More than one in four (26%) are already using object storage in production and another 26% are evaluating object storage or using it in their test/dev environment. These numbers are expected to grow as another 35% report that they are planning to evaluate object storage in the next 12 months.

Why so much activity around object storage? Storage footprints are high and growing (66% of the survey respondents had more than 500TBs of data) and respondents rate the freedom to use standard hardware for their storage workloads as an important criteria (very important – 51%; somewhat important – 35%) to cost-effectively support their increasing capacity requirements. Interestingly, open source was also an important consideration for nearly three in four IT professionals’ infrastructure going forward (very important – 35%; somewhat important 38%) indicating a shift away from traditional commercial vendors.

By using the open source engine that runs the world’s largest storage clouds, OpenStack Swift, SwiftStack supports these reported goals by enabling scale for extreme concurrent access of unstructured data, so enterprise customers may shift to consumable private cloud deployments to best suit their application use cases. As such, SwiftStack is suited to support a range of enterprise use cases including archiving active data, serving web content, sharing documents and storing backups with complete data portability and the freedom to choose, and change, hardware and infrastructure resources.

“The cloud has transformed enterprise IT permanently and companies such as SwiftStack have contributed to the deflation in the consumption of traditional storage,” said Ashish Nadkarni, program director, enterprise servers and storage, IDC. “Private cloud deployments are now enabling enterprises to achieve new levels of scale, efficiency and agility that are unlike anything they’ve seen possible with traditional datacenter deployments. Enterprises are now leveraging private cloud storage, such as SwiftStack, in ways previously unimaginable in traditional storage environments.”

For the enterprise, SwiftStack Object Storage delivers private cloud advantages for a range of enterprise unstructured data use cases.

From serving web application content to active archiving, backup, file sharing and more,
SwiftStack offers following benefits:

• No Hardware Lock-In – SwiftStack Object Storage runs on any industry-standard x86 server hardware with standard HDDs available from any vendor, so enterprises can use their preferred server vendor or mix-and-match hardware from multiple server and HDD vendors to optimize capital investments and do much more for less
• Centralized Management – The SwiftStack Object Storage Controller manages all object storage clusters from a single, centralized management interface, reducing storage complexity and conserving IT resources so the focus can remain on application operations
• Authentication – SwiftStack Object Storage integrates with existing enterprise authentication infrastructure, including Active Directory and LDAP for faster provisioning and simplified storage user management
• Unified Namespace – A SwiftStack Object Storage Cluster can be spread over multiple, geographically distributed data centers with a single namespace, while also enabling admins to create multiple tiers for complete control over where data is stored

“SwiftStack was founded on the idea that Enterprises desire powerful technologies used by the largest cloud providers, but need any product to fit with their operations,” said Joe Arnold, president and chief product officer, SwiftStack. “SwiftStack is a new breed of truly software-defined object storage, delivered on-premises, running on standard hardware and managed out-of-band by the SwiftStack Controller. Our goal is any server or storage administrator can operate cloud storage in their environment.“