For Seagate Kinetic to fly…it’s gonna take an ecosystem

This week at Seagate, we announced our Kinetic Open Storage Platform, and are excited about the buzz the platform is generating. It’s always great to garner news coverage and analyst opinions, both good and bad, that not only reinforce the direction of the platform, but also let’s us know where more clarity can be provided.

Some of the experts weigh in:

Geoff Arnold writes on Speaking of Clouds, “Yesterday Seagate introduced its Kinetic Open Storage Platform, and I’m simply blown away by it. It’s a truly elegant design, as simple as possible, but no simpler…I love this design…If everything works out, this will become the new standard interface for disk drives. (And, well, any kind of mass storage.) This is going to be fun. “Disruptive” seems inadequate.” Read more.

Chris Mellor of The Register says, “Seagate is building hard disk drives with a direct Ethernet interface and object-style API access for scalable object stores, a plan which – if it works – would destroy much of the existing, typical storage stack.” Read more.

Greg Schulz from Storage IO says, “For those looking to do object storage systems, or cloud and other scale based solutions, Kinetic represents a new tool to do your due diligence and learn more about.” Read more.

Eric Slack or Storage Switzerland says, “Reducing complexity, like collapsing the storage stack described above, is one such improvement. Making a system less complex is a fundamental objective of virtually all storage system designs and one that Seagate’s new technology should help achieve. It can reduce the hardware required, make software easier to develop and help address the cost of storing digital content that’s currently threatening the economics of the cloud business model.” Read more.

Henry Baltazar of Forrester says, “If this storage architecture is commercially successful it will be extraordinarly disruptive since the direct connectivity from drives to applications will eliminate storage controllers, file systems, SANs and even RAID from the storage data path.”  Read more.

Howard Marks, Network Computing blogger says, “Seagate is making an interesting move in the disk drive space with its Kinetic Open Storage platform, a new storage architecture that shifts much of the intelligence in a modern storage system to new disk drives with Ethernet interfaces.” Read more.

Tom Coughlin, President of Coughlin Associates, on Forbes says, “For cloud storage to continue to support the growth of the mobile device infrastructure and the content needs for internet traffic, HDDs and magnetic tape must evolve to support the move to object storage architectures.  Both the Seagate Kinetic HDD and the Spectra Logic BlackPearl appliance with DS3 are major moves to support the continued growth and intelligent management of an ever expanding library of data in cloud storage systems.” Read more.

The VAR Guy says, “Kinetic is another example of how the open source cloud is becoming cheaper and more efficient every day. And partnerships across the channel, as Seagate’s collaboration with open source software vendors shows, are key to that improvement.”  Read more.

Dave Raffo of Storage Soup – A SearchStorage.com blog says, “If you need more proof that object storage is picking up steam, there is the Kinetic Open Storage Platform unveiled by Seagate this week. If it flies, the architecture can provide a huge boost to object storage and cloud storage adoption.” Read more.

To Dave’s point, “If it flies…” is what we aim to do next.  Prove that it flies. Prove that it does exactly what we messaged it would do: increase performance, reduce complexity, lower costs.  And, the only way to do that is to first, excite a community of developers to design applications based on Kinetic’s Key Value structure, and second, arm our already existing ecosystem of system builders to design solutions that run said software applications. Finally, get it into the hands of scale-out customers – cloud customers – and put it to the test…measure, re-measure, and measure again.

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