We have looked at IBM Cleversafe, which is now IBM Cloud Object Storage. 

We had discussions about Scality and Cloudian. 

We looked at NetApp StorageGRID Webscale, which was the vendor who we were considering since NetApp has a large presence in the government space and we wanted to look at something familiar. 

We had a history of working with the Dell EMC ECS product, which was originally called Atmos, then ViPR. We didn't buy the hardware appliance. We bought the software only. The hardware being used is our Dell hardware. 

We talked about Ceph because they do have object storage interfaces, but decided not to go with them for lack of product maturity.

Looking at these vendors gave us some metrics to compare against. The primary reason for going with SwiftStack was the low cost of entry. They had comparable features to other vendors, but won out on price.

We sort of reevaluated the use of our Spectra Logic tape library. We also reevaluated the Data Domain that we had been using. We looked at a couple other object storage solutions at the time which were Cleversafe and DDN.

At the time, these solutions were more expensive and seemed to follow a similar pattern of providing appliances that would then lock you in. Thus, you were beholden to the manufacturer to deliver an upgraded hardware box, and you still had to buy their certified drives. E.g., even though it was going from a dedupe appliance to an object storage system, you were almost going from a dedupe appliance to an object store appliance, which had its own vendor lock-in.

We wanted the capability to be able to add capacity and drives without having to pay a markup for them, and be able to look at the best bang for the buck across all the vendors. So, we knew that we were going to lose that flexibility if we went with DDN or Cleversafe, because they were selling the entire box, whereas SwiftStack is agnostic. They don't care what the box is underneath. As long as it's an x86 compatible system, you could mix and match. This was one of the deciding factors that hardware-agnostic approach. At the end of the day, if we wanted to, we could basically take SwiftStack out of the picture, and we would still continue to function. They just facilitate making the management of the system easier. You could do it without them. It would be a lot more difficult and require a lot more time, effort, and energy, or someone who knows the technology.

We chose SwiftStack over NetApp or Dell EMC because it is hardware agnostic and the initial capital expenditure was significantly less. Also, the ongoing support and maintenance were significantly less. The flexibility and the ability to scale faster because we weren't tied to any one particular vendor's certification of specific hardware or specific hard drives was another driver.

We also evaluated Scality and Cohesity.

It helped us to decrease our costs for storing and utilizing data. This was based on a comparative basis versus other choices that we considered.

At Surfsara we already had several different storage solutions. In that sense, we did do a comparison because we were already running some of the competitive solutions in-house. For one service, we run Scality for object-based storage. And our cloud has a big Ceph cluster. The supercomputer storage cluster is based on Lustre.

The only question we had was staying with open-source or buying the commercial version.

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