Caringo Swarm sales jumped 40% in 2017

Despite all the talk about object storage over the years, it has yet to push scale-out NAS out of the enterprise for storing files that take up hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of capacity. But early object storage vendor Caringo reports progress, with a 40% year-over-year sales increase in 2017 due to a heavy expansion of the footprint of previous customers along with an intake of new customers.

Caringo also reported 50% growth in the fourth quarter compared to the previous year. Adrian Herrera, vice president of marketing at Caringo, said most of the increase is due to previous customers adding capacity to their Caringo Swarm object storage implementations.

“We are seeing customers start with hundreds of terabytes and expanding to multiple petabytes,” he said.

Herrera said Caringo Swarm scale-out hybrid cloud object storage is picking up steam with the media and entertainment companies. Caringo has partnered with Reach Engine by Level Beyond, Pixit Media and CatDV to serve that market. He said as companies become more familiar with the Amazon S3 API, they warm to object storage.

“It’s really because of the Amazon S3 API acceptance,” Herrera said. “There are some asset managers that we have been certified with and their adoption of the S3 API makes it easy for us to plug into their solutions.”

Herrera said Caringo Swarm sales are also growing in local and federal government and high-performance computing markets.

Still, with its target customer storing such large data sets, the sales process remains lengthy for object storage deals.

“It’s not uncommon to see a deal take about a year,” Herrera said. “Object storage deals take a long time. But it is compressing. The sales process is accelerating because people are a lot more comfortable with object storage.”

Jon Toigo, CEO and managing partner at Toigo International Partners, credited Caringo with helping to lead the wave of object storage vendors embracing Amazon Web Services’ public cloud.

“Many object-level storage companies, citing client cloud storage preferences, started emulating Caringo by adding Amazon Web Services storage compatibility to their kit,” Toigo wrote in a December 2017 Storage Magazine article. “Some added file system-like interfaces to help users who understood the hierarchical file systems better than mystical object storage and access methods.”

Caringo Swarm also supports Microsoft Azure’s Blob storage for customers who want an alternative to AWS.