It was the first object storage product that we ever installed. We had more traditional storage, like a NetApp or a Dell-type solution with a traditional NAS or SAN. 

This was our first object storage solution. We decided to move to it because of the cost savings associated with having unstructured data being stored on deep, dense storage than using commodity hardware. Even when you look at the traditional filer, there's a lot more cost that goes into it. It's less flexible. So it was really to provide that flexibility of what you get in an Amazon or Microsoft Cloud to be able to run that on-premise.

We did use a different solution. We switched because of cost and scalability. The initial purchase price, ongoing support, and maintenance costs, also coupled with the difficulty in scaling made it almost a no-brainer for us to move off of them.

At a previous employer I had experience with Amplidata, Core System, and DDN WOS. The way we got to SwiftStack is that I came from a medical facility where they did research into genomics, Big Data. We were leveraging object stores there for data archiving, and to have less expensive, long-term storage for large amounts of data.

When I came onboard here in 2014, I looked at their needs and said, "Hey, they have the same exact problem, just on a smaller scale. And that's how it started. I proposed it, brought it in as a backup target first, and that worked so well that we started extending it into data archiving.

We switched to SwiftStack due to technical problems with the previous company.

We didn't have a previous solution. 

I had read about the solution and was very interested in it because, as I mentioned before, we were looking for some kind of all-around, online disk storage solution. At the same time, we saw an increasing interest in people wanting to use storage which supported the S3 protocol. That's how we ended up with SwiftStack.

We always used SwiftStack. When we implemented OpenStack Swift, it was done with SwiftStack. We haven't used any other solution, and we haven't replaced any other solution to use SwiftStack.

I have used different solutions in the past, but only ever open-source, never anything commercial.

This organization was using open-source Swift prior. We switched to SwiftStack when we began selling it to customers. We switched to the commercial version in case we need support, but we really haven't needed any support.