Caringo today released updates to its Swarm software-defined object storage platform. Swarm 8.1 offers new functionality including the addition of hierarchical data protection policies, historical metrics and usage metering.
Swarm is unified storage software for data protection, management, organization and search at scale. It is enabled by pure object storage, designed to store unstructured data also referred to as fixed content or reference information. Swarm runs on standard, commodity server hardware (x86), which can be used to store all of an organization’s content because it delivers the speed of primary storage that is secure enough to archive content for the duration of its useful life. It provides the ability to consolidate content delivery, ongoing analysis, and dynamic preservation.
Among the functionality of the latest platform release is new hierarchical data protection policies that allow users to set policies through Swarm’s UI or via an API across clusters, domains, buckets or objects. Features include erasure coding and replication factors, content lifecycle, and WORM enabling/disabling.
Now viewable through Swarm’s cluster management UI or custom API integrations are historical metrics that provide trend analysis to better enable capacity planning and monitoring. Users have access to disk usage and activity, hardware statistics and operational counters to provide insight into how the storage environment is performing while allowing responsive adjustments to ensure system optimization.
Swarm’s new metering provides Managed Service Providers and enterprises a new method of viewing usage data with flexible queries available to improve billing, show-back, and capacity planning. Users can search customizable date ranges for bandwidth and storage usage, drilling down to the tenant/domain/bucket levels for a 360-degree view of the storage environment. An embedded RESTful management API provides integration into existing billing applications with control for multi-tenant delegation.