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In the beginning of the open source OpenStack cloud effort, there were two projects – Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Swift is an integrated part of most OpenStack distributions but it is also the focus for a standalone company called SwiftStack, which was founded by Joe Arnold.
In a video interview, Arnold discusses the current status of his company, which closed a $16 million round of funding in October and has total funding to date of $23.6 million.
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“We’re not a distribution, we’re a software product that installs on top of a Linux operating system,” Arnold explained.
Fundamentally, SwiftStack enables a form of Software Defined Storage, though that’s not what Arnold called it when he started the company.
“Customers said they didn’t want an appliance, they wanted to buy storage like they buy compute, with the software to come in to control and mange it,” Arnold said.
While SwiftStack is a leading contributor to Swift, the project is much larger than any one company.
“The exciting thing about Swift’s future is that it’s not just going to be a single company that set the direction that Swift is going,” Arnold said. “It’s really going to be a collaborative effort getting a lot of companies on board.”
Watch the full video interview with Joe Arnold below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
