Software-defined storage vendor SwiftStack has taken on $ 6.1 million in Series A venture funding, giving more momentum to the movement to make object storage in the data center more flexible.
Mayfield Fund led the round, bringing the total raised to $ 7.6 million and enabling San Francisco-based SwiftStack to add employees and further build out its software.
Software like SwiftStack’s, which can run on hardware inside a company’s data centers and in private clouds, offers the public cloud’s advantage of easy and quick scalability inside private clouds, similar to what Amazon Web Services uses to power its S3 public-cloud storage product. It works with OpenStack Swift.
A handful of other software-defined storage startups with varying specialties have taken on venture capital in recent months including ScaleIO, Convergent.io and Nutanix. Last month Jeda Networks, a company that wants to move storage around the data center using virtualized networks, said it had raised venture capital, too.
SwiftStack thinks it can stand out in the software-defined storage space by catering its product to the needs of companies developing web, mobile and as-a-service applications, CEO Joe Arnold said. Those types of companies can benefit from being able to easily distribute storage on commodity hardware during usage and enrollment peaks.
Don’t expect the area to fade into the background. Navin Chaddha, managing director of the Mayfield Fund told me he thinks “it is the beginning of an era” for software-defined storage as a whole.
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