Storage vendor Seagate has unveiled its new object-based storage drive, the Seagate Kinetic HDD, aimed at cloud hosting service providers. Based on the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform, Kinetic HDD would dramatically reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by combining an open source object storage protocol with Ethernet connectivity to eliminate multiple layers of legacy software and hardware infrastructure.
“Over the past decade, the unprecedented explosion of data has been driven by social media, smartphones, tablets, and the rapid growth of every sort of Internet-connected device,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. “Cloud hosting service providers (CSPs) are increasingly looking for solutions that will simplify infrastructure, improve scalability and reduce costs – Seagate Kinetic HDD addresses these needs revolutionizing the data storage economics for today’s cloud and beyond.”
Kinetic Open Storage Platform
Introduced in 2013, the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform has garnered broad industry support from cloud and enterprise customers, as well as software and hardware systems partners, including AOL, Digital Sense, and HP, which have collaborated to support the open Kinetic API and helped to enable this new storage technology to come to market.
“The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform is a compelling technology that has the potential to empower data centers with more scalable solutions at an industry-low TCO,” said Dave Reinsel, IDC’s group vice president for storage and semiconductors. “Seagate’s move into this space is a strategic addition to its core storage business as it aligns with the open community, as well as with the needs of CSPs that are looking for new architectures to manage their vast and growing lakes of data.”
The Kinetic Open Storage platform improves drive and rack level performance by eliminating the need for legacy file systems and shifting HDD storage media space management to the drive itself. It delivers a streamlined architecture allowing storage applications to talk directly to Kinetic object storage HDDs. Performance is further enhanced by eliminating storage server bottlenecks via direct IP addressing of each drive, thereby improving system level throughput.
Open Source API
The platform enables servers and storage to be scaled independently and developed more rapidly. Cloud hosting data centers can add servers and storage at entirely different rates, matching each precisely to their needs. In addition, HDD innovation can progress more rapidly as servers and operating systems are shielded from device changes through the Kinetic open source API.
For more information on the Seagate Kinetic HDD and the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform, please visit www.seagate.com/www/kinetichdd.
