The open source OpenStack platform is seeing increased adoption in the enterprise and with that, the ecosystem of vendors around the platform is also growing. On the storage side, SwiftStack offers enterprises an OpenStack-based object storage service based on the Swift object storage platform.
Today, SwiftStack announced that it has raised a $16 million Series B round led by OpenView Venture Partners, a firm that specializes in working with B2B companies, with participation from existing investors Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures and UMC Capital. This brings SwiftStack’s total funding after its $6.1 million round last year and previous seed investments to $23.6 million. The company says it grew 4x over the past year, despite the fact that it barely has a marketing or sales staff.
SwiftStack, which is the largest contributor to the OpenStack Swift project, says it will use this new funding to “scale its efforts to enable massive storage scalability for the enterprise simply and affordably.” In addition, the company plans to use the money to expand its go-to-market and customer-engagement efforts.
Solutions like Swift allow enterprises to reuse their existing storage solutions, but more importantly, businesses can use a mix of commodity hardware and public and private clouds to store their data, with Swift (and SwiftStack’s Controller) handling provisioning, replication, failover, monitoring and all the other tasks necessary to keep a large storage cluster up and running.
Like similar open source projects, SwiftStack offers its customers additional services and products that make working with Swift easier, including the SwiftStack Management Service and SwiftStack Controller. Current SwiftStack users include the likes of HP, Disney and Time Warner Cable.