Backing up our data to physical media like DVD and MOs was manageable when files and hard drives were smaller but with 2 TB drives becoming the norm the cost of media and the time required to do so were frankly prohibitive. Swarm met all of our business needs. It scales incrementally in a cost-effective way and it provides a good level of security for forensic storage by providing access and proof of non-tampering.

The system, as a whole, is working perfectly and delivers on the set-it-and-forget’it promise. And, it is also very easy to add shares/mountpoints.

As far as the cost savings, it isn’t necessarily in the upfront acquisition, it’s in the maintenance over time. We aren’t rebuying hardware and software every five years and then going through a forklift upgrade. With the Caringo solution we are saving at least half the cost over one refresh cycle, and we’re able to upgrade in smaller increments,” says Williams. “And since data is better protected, we can push our refresh cycle of hardware to every six to seven years. As hard drive densities get better and better we just keep benefitting.

In 2010 we chose Caringo Swarm because it was the most flexible platform for us and had a good per TB licensing, but we are sticking with it because of its flexibility and the continuous improvement in existing and new features.

It’s all about the bottom line. Less hardware, store more and spend less time managing it. With Caringo, you can manage multiple petabytes with one resource. This completely changes our ability to scale to meet all of our clients’ demands.

Overall, I think we will be moving more and more towards object storage since it is simpler to manage and to scale.

Maintaining backups and archives is very expensive. With erasure coding, replication and other data protection features, we can move away from traditional backup. Object storage can take care of itself. Resiliency and flexibility is the real benefit for us.

We're migrating all our storage to Swarm, says Van Eenaeme. "Since the basic functionality of our websites is free, we have to make sure we find the best solution for its value. It's not only the price per terabyte, but also the total cost per terabyte: How many servers you need, how many engineers are required to operate the systems, etc. It's clear that Swarmis a winner.

The Swarm API made it possible to develop a callback file system to provide a traditional file system interface. This made integration with our document imaging system almost completely transparent. Through this custom callback file system, we were also able to implement additional features such as file encryption and file caching to further improve security and performance.” Additionally, Mr. Brown mentioned Swarm’s ability to gracefully manage disk failure without service disruption as a benefit. “We haven’t had any node failures, but we’ve had a disk failure. When this occurred, Swarm responded by automatically creating additional replicas on other drives. We were able to replace the failed drive and then Swarm rebalanced the replicas across all drives.