Start-Up Profile: SwiftStack

Company
SwiftStack Inc.

HQs
San Francisco CA

Date founded
Fall 2011

Financial funding

$1.5 million in seed funding
series A $6.1 million in 2013
$16 million series B round in 2014 led by OpenView Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and UMC Capital
total $23.6 million

Main executives

Don Jaworski, CEO: His career includes executive positions with NetApp, Brocade, Ipsilon Networks (Nokia), Sun Microsystems (Oracle) and Amdahl before arriving in the company in January 2015.

Joe Arnold, co-founder and chief product officer: He managed the first public OpenStack launch of Swift independent of Rackspace, and has subsequently deployed multiple large-scale cloud storage systems.
Anders Tjernlund, co-founder and COO: He built and ran operations teams at BEA Systems, Engine Yard and other venture backed companies. He was also an EIR at El Dorado Ventures.
Orion Auld, co-founder and VP engineering: Previously he was director of engineering at SideReel, and before that, senior agile coach with Yahoo!. He has written software at companies such as Digital Chocolate, Idealab, and Convex Computer.
Randall Jackson, VP sales: He drove enterprise sales in North America for MongoDB. Before that, he established MarkLogic public sector. Earlier, he was a sales leader at Visual Analytics and sales rep at Verity.
Mario Blandini, VP marketing: He has previously lead marketing teams for storage companies including Brocade, Drobo, and HGST (WD). He has also deployed infrastructure in technical roles at Rhapsody Networks (Brocade), Sanrise (EMC), Adaptec (PMC-Sierra), and the United States Marine Corps.

Advisory board

Jay Kidd: He has previously served as CTO and CMO for NetApp, and CTO and VP of product management at Brocade.
Dave Roberson: He is a private investor and business consultant being a member of the board of Quantum, RagingWire Data Centers, TransLattice and Aster Investment Management Company. He previously served as SVP in the enterprise server storage and networking division of Hewlett-Packard, and prior to that was the CEO at HDS.

Number of employees
60

Technology
Object storage for enterprises built on OpenStack Swift

Products description
SwiftStack’s object storage delivers pay-as-you-grow pricing, and scalability of public cloud storage, but made for private deployment in enterprise data centers, behind their firewalls. The solution, built on OpenStack Swift at its core, is managed by an out-of-band controller and includes scale-out nodes with rolling upgrades as well as a files system gateway interface for traditional applications.

Company involved in OpenStack Swift

SwiftStack Object Storage System

Components:

Controller: Manage the entire storage system; sits out-of-band from the data path and enables administrators to deploy, scale, upgrade, and monitor the storage system across multiple sites.
Nodes: SwiftStack Node software is installed on industry-standard x86 hardware with standard Linux distributions. The system enables administrators to mix-and-match hardware from multiple vendors, matching capital investments directly to storage needs.
Filesystem Gateway (optional): Provides flexibility to store and retrieve files via NFS or CIFS protocols. Unlike most other file system gateways, files stored via the gateway can also be accessed via RESTful HTTP API as objects and vice versa.

In October 2013, SwiftStack was one the first software company to collaborate with Seagate for Kinetic Ethernet disk drives for scale-out storage cluster.

Released date
July 27, 2013

Price range
Starting at $375/TB per year, pay as you grow

Roadmap
Encryption of data at rest, new possibilities for access to unstructured data in workflows and for harnessing the power of metadata

Partners
Hardware partners include Intel, HP, Cisco and Seagate. Software partners include Veritas, Commvault, Avere and Vizrt.

Distributors
Software available from SwiftStack or from systems integrators including Penguin Computing, Silicon Mechanics, Redapt and Onx Enterprise Solutions

Number of customers
50

Main customers
HP IT, Dreamworks, Pac-12 Networks, Cisco Technical Assistance Centre, eBay, Paypal, Mitel, RockStar Games

Applications
Active archive, genomics research, media creation and distribution workflows, backup and archiving, private cloud

Target markets
Enterprise private cloud, media and entertainment, life sciences/biotechnology, scientific research, web/SaaS, service provider

Competitors
Include Amplidata (HGST), Caringo, Cleversafe (IBM), Cloudian, EMC Atmos, Scality.