Storage provider Seagate Technology today unveiled its new object-based storage drive Kinetic HDD. Based on the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform, Kinetic HDD claims to 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 – simplifying cloud storage architectures.
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 Hewlett Packard, which have collaborated to support the open Kinetic API and helped to enable this new storage technology to come to market.
“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. Cloud service providers (CSPs) are increasingly looking for solutions that will simplify infrastructure, improve scalability and reduce costs— Kinetic HDD addresses these needs revolutionizing the data storage economics for today’s cloud and beyond,” said Scott Horn, Vice President – M arketing, Seagate.
The platform simplifies large-scale storage architectures by eliminating the overhead of an entire storage server tier, which in turn lowers equipment costs. Fewer number of storage servers also reduces power consumption and headcount expenses associated with managing storage, resulting in lower operating costs, for a combined savings of up to 50%.
“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. 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,” said Dave Reinsel, Group Vice President – Storage and Semiconductors, IDC.
It 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.
The platform enables servers and storage to be scaled independently and developed more rapidly. Cloud 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.