SwiftStack Unveils Latest Edition of Flagship Data Storage/Management System

SwiftStack has unveiled extensive enhancements to its data platform for performance, data utilization, and services at ultra-scale. The new SwiftStack 7 enables demanding workloads such as advanced machine learning, media analytics, and scientific research, in environments like autonomous vehicle development, ingest and processing of 4K/8K video, and other compute-intensive processes. SwiftStack 7 will be released in November.

Emerging data-intensive applications require a modern storage architecture with the ability to feed thousands of GPUs working in parallel, from a single global namespace spanning edge, core, and cloud data stores. SwiftStack’s platform accommodates data sets that scale to hundreds of petabytes and even exabytes, enabling data access at unprecedented speeds – more than 100GB per second – to thousands of workers. SwiftStack 7 offers new features to enable this ultra-scale performance, distributed flash-based caching, data immutability, and workflow integration all with standards-based APIs.

“Right now, data is changing the world, applications can exist anywhere from the edge to the core data center to the cloud, and data management and control has been decoupled from core infrastructure,” says Joe Arnold, SwiftStack founder and chief product officer. “Our customers are pushing the boundaries in demanding environments, such as deep learning, and SwiftStack 7 is the foundation for delivering performance, capacity, and services at scale.”

Ultra-scale Performance Architecture
SwiftStack drives previously unseen throughput performance at massive multi-petabyte scale and can handle thousands of simultaneous workers accessing data. Independent third-party testing on similar hardware and workloads validates SwiftStack 7 is multiple times faster than competitors, realizing extremely high production throughput speeds at over 100GB per second. The simple, open architecture allows linear scaling of both performance and capacity.

ProxyFS Edge
ProxyFS Edge extends SwiftStack’s file services to be distributed at the edge, close to the application, for high-throughput, data-intensive use cases. The containerized ProxyFS agent at the edge provides caching capabilities to minimize latency while providing massive throughput to large datasets stored at the core. ProxyFS Edge is an extension of the existing ProxyFS clustered filesystem that allows for file and object API access to the same data sets.

1space File Connector
The newest component of SwiftStack 1space, the 1space File Connector, brings existing enterprise file data into the cloud namespace so cloud-native applications can access data via S3 or Swift object APIs without complex migration. The containerized 1space File Connector interacts with network-attached storage (NAS) and can scale out to provided high-performance access of files to modern applications. This allows businesses and organizations to modernize their workflows incrementally and apply 1space data placement and protection policies (copy, move, tier) to file data when needed.

SwiftStack PRO
SwiftStack PRO (Professional Remote Operations) is an optional service developed from best practices employed by hundreds of large-scale customers, includes advanced professional service- and software-based capabilities to allow 24×7 remote management and monitoring of SwiftStack production clusters. SwiftStack PRO ensures teams of any size can keep a highly-utilized data storage and management platform optimized for demanding uses.

SwiftStack 7 For AI
SwiftStack 7’s new capabilities are essential for deep learning at ultra-scale. This customer-proven architecture stack satisfies the storage performance needed by GPU compute complexes and modern AI frameworks accessing and processing hundreds of petabytes of data. SwiftStack’s architecture delivers elasticity from edge to core to cloud, data immutability for long-term referencability, and viable TCO. For more details on the new performance and scale requirements of demanding AI applications, please read the white paper “The SwiftStack AI Architecture” at swiftstack.com/ai.

“Data scientists are constrained by inherited infrastructure, particularly in performance, scalability, cost, metadata enrichment, workflow integration, and portability to accommodate data at the edge, core, and cloud,” says George Crump, Chief Steward at Storage Switzerland. “Large enterprise customers need to architect a data pipeline and framework to deliver business outcomes and intelligence, and SwiftStack’s software is a strategic component supporting these modern applications.”

SwiftStack 7 will be released in November, containing the ultra-scale performance enhancements and the 1space File Connector. ProxyFS Edge is currently in beta and will be generally available in early 2020. SwiftStack PRO and the SwiftStack AI Architecture are available immediately.