San Francisco-based SwiftStack has announced the general availability of its private cloud storage product. The company's software-defined storage (SDS) solution is based on the OpenStack Swift object storage system. The solution is set to challenge alternatives running in the public cloud, which SwiftStack says it can match in flexibility and control, all at a significantly lower cost. In fact, it already claims to have dozens of customers and multiple petabytes under management.

The company, which was founded in 2011, made itself known earlier this year when it completed a Series A funding round in the amount of $6.1 million backed by Mayfield Fund, Storm Ventures, and UMC Capital. Its goal was to help operations teams implement and manage an easy-to-use, multitenant, and highly scalable cloud storage platform. With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams could leverage the power of the public cloud inside their own data centers.

When it comes to building a private cloud, many IT shops are looking for a way to cost-effectively manage and share access to massive amounts of unstructured data that continues to spread across the organization.

"The growth of mobile, Web, and SaaS applications among service providers and enterprises has led to increased data demands," said Joe Arnold, co-founder and CEO at SwiftStack. "In today's world of cloud-based applications, users expect data to be available to them whenever they want, on multiple devices. Data centers need to be able to cater to these new demands."

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