SwiftStack Announces Version 3.0

By Bio-IT World Staff

October 26, 2015 | Today at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, SwiftStack released version 3.0 of its software with new features that extend the benefits of object storage to enterprise applications.

SwiftStack 3.0 offers Amazon S3 API emulation to expand access to any application and consolidate unstructured data, whether file system or object storage, in private clouds built on SwiftStack storage. The new version introduces new Controller features for Enterprise, letting users deploy on-premises or in the cloud with a dedicated controller for on-premises deployments, said Mario Blandini, SwiftStack’s VP of marketing. “Previously you could restore from backup, now it’s an active secondary controller.” The controller also improves authentication and infrastructure management. Finally, 3.0 offers data protection flexibility with erasure codes that require less capacity when density is the priority.

SwiftStack has been working closely with customers and partners over the past months. Avere announced support for SwiftStack in September, and several users including the HudsonAlpha Institute and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have spoken about their experience with SwiftStack at past Bio-IT World events.

Coming down the pipeline, Blandini said, are improvements in metadata storage and searching. “What if you had the ability to crawl—not unlike a search engine crawls the internet to draw associations based on a certain keyword—what if you could do that in an unlimited-sized storage pool to go get exactly what you needed in minutes versus it being a three week project?”

This type of metadata searching is a “new possibility for the future” Blandini said, and he expects to have more details on that by the 2016 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, at which SwiftStack is a sponsor, next April.