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SDN-inspired cloud storage

The veil has been lifted for the first time on the underlying architecture of Signiant’s redesigned cloud platform, which supports the company’s Media Shuttle and SkyDrop file movement products.

The new architecture, driven by the company’s introduction of cloud products, involves the separation of the software that controls file transfers, the control plane, from the data plane, which is the software that performs file transfers.

This concept, borrowed from the principles of Software Defined Networking (SDN), allows Signiant to use the cloud to increase the pace of innovation.

The new SDN-like architecture has enabled Signiant to take an incremental approach to SaaS implementation. “Because the piece that initiates and controls the file transfers is in the cloud, we can evolve it much quicker than if it was on-premise software relying on customers to perform upgrade and maintain it,” explained Ian Hamilton, CTO at Signiant.

“Historically, our software was installed on the customer’s infrastructure on-premise. Many companies just replicate their software and deploy it on virtual machines in the cloud, but we rebuilt our platform in a cloud-form architecture to offer global availability, scale, automatic updates and so on.”