It's AWS re:Invent week, and that means a huge number of cloud-related announcements
This week sees Amazon Web Services (AWS) holding its annual re:Invent conference in sunny Las Vegas. Since AWS is the public cloud vendor that everyone agrees rules the roost, it is unsurprising to see a huge proliferation of pitches in my inbox all hanging off the AWS event.
Some of these pitches are completely irrelevant to re:Invent (“this new aftershave for men is designed for the public cloud”), while others are far more related to the fundamental change in the way that technology is done that AWS represents.
+ Also on Network World: How to make hybrid cloud work +
A case in point is SwiftStack‘s announcement regarding its offerings designed to ease hybrid cloud adoption.
SwiftStack is a vendor that powers private cloud storage. You’d be forgiven for thinking there isn’t much overlap between it and AWS, since SwiftStack plays in the private cloud and AWS is (at least at this stage) an entirely public cloud vendor. The reality, however, is very different. While there are a small number of “born in the cloud” organizations (that are 100 percent and irrevocably situated in the public cloud), the vast majority of large enterprises face a more nuanced reality. They need to consider the public cloud within the context of their existing IT assets, and as such, a hybrid approach makes sense.
This is the value proposition SwiftStack offers—its software runs behind the enterprise firewall and within infrastructure that is totally controlled by the organization’s IT team. It allows, however, storage to be thought of as a scalable and distributed asset and, hence, helps with a “cloud-like,” albeit not fully cloud, view of storage.
SwiftStack Cloud Sync generally available
That proposition is being extended today with the news that SwiftStack is offering its cloud sync capability as a generally available feature. Cloud Sync is designed to help organizations situate data in line with utilization requirements and policy and governance rules.
Unlike most cloud gateways, built-in SwiftStack Cloud Sync works to replicate native objects to a bucket in the public cloud and does not store them in a proprietary archive. That means applications can easily access and operate on the data, enabling CDN, active archive and collaboration solutions. As of today, Cloud Sync supports AWS storage and Google Cloud Nearline Storage in hybrid solutions.
“Our customers use the Amazon Web Services S3 API to access SwiftStack storage on premises and feel their data center is comprised of storage that is both behind their firewall and in the public cloud,” said SwiftStack CEO Don Jaworski. “Tiering to the cloud is an active solution, giving applications the freedom to take advantage of AWS S3 or Google Cloud Nearline Storage today as a data repository while IT uses policies to centrally manage corporate data.”
According to the company, this year it will be expanding the capabilities of Cloud Sync to support additional public cloud platforms and other private cloud platforms.
While it may not pass the acid test from the dyed-in-the-wool public cloud fans, SwiftStack’s Cloud Sync is a pragmatic reaction to customers’ current state.
