SwiftStack 7 storage upgrade targets AI, machine learning use cases

The San Francisco software vendor's roots lie in the storage, backup and archive of massive amounts of unstructured data on commodity servers running a commercially supported version of OpenStack Swift. But SwiftStack has steadily expanded its reach over the last eight years, and its 7.0 update takes aim at the new scale-out storage and data management architecture the company claims is necessary for AI, machine learning and analytics workloads. SwiftStack said it worked with customers to design clusters that scale linearly to handle multiple petabytes of data and support throughput of more than 100 GB per second. That allows it to handle workloads such as autonomous vehicle applications that feed data into GPU-based servers. Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, said throughput of 100 GB per second is "really fast" for any type of storage and "incredible" for an object-based system.