Seagate courts developers with the Seagate Kinetic platform

Original image by: http://blog.thetus.com/tag/thetus-corporation/

Seagate is proving itself to be a storage platform company and is courting software developers to help make it happen.

I’m talking about Seagate’s Kinetic Open Storage Platform: part storage device, part Ethernet, part Key/Value API, and part software development. Seagate’s got the first 3 covered taking a traditional storage device like a hard disk drive (HDD) adding Ethernet connectivity, and Key/Value Libraries, but the most critical component to the platform is the software developer community.

The benefits of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform when compared to the traditional hardware-centric approach of storage servers, RAID controllers and host bus adapters, backplanes, etc. are significant when it comes to performance, scale, and cost (both CAPEX and OPEX). To get the full scope of what I am talking about, read the Seagate Kinetic Vision.

Seagate is already working with the likes of SwiftStack (Swift) and Basho (Riak) to design Kinetic-based software solutions that take advantage of Key/Value stores and ethernet connectivity.

For developers interested in taking a look at Seagate Kinetic platform, Seagate has launched a developers.seagate.com Wiki and a repository on GitHub for all of the latest developer tools and resources. Seagate’s Advanced Storage team continues to add new tools and resources to both the Wiki and the GitHub sites as new information and tools become available.

1. Seagate Developer Wiki:

General Overview and Kinetic Vision
Software developer resources: Libraries and Virtual Drives
Hardware developer resources
Cluster Design
Security
How-To’s & Use Cases
Simple Object Storage
Fault Recovery
Replication and Rebalancing with Peer-to-Peer Operations
Auditing with GetKeyList and Get Options
Multiple Clients with Shared Key/Value Objects
Multiple Tenants and Private Key/Value Objects
Distributed Hash Tables
Distributed File Systems
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
Memcached
OpenStack Swift
Basho Riak CS

2. Drive Simulator and Developer Tools

Suggested Development Environments
Latest version of Git for your OS
JDK 1.6 or later
Eclipse IDE For Java Developers. Version 4.2 (Juno) or later
Maven 3.0.3 or later
Download Kinetic Simulator and Java API runtime libraries, Java API Javadoc, and Examples
Getting Started With Simulator
Admin Command Line Usage
Erlang client runtime library
Python client runtime library

This is relatively new ground for Seagate, but I have to say it’s very exciting not only for Seagate, but for the software developer community. Seagate looks to engage with developers more than ever before to solve real-world problems that go way beyond HDD capacity, performance, and reliability. When you open up the storage device and enable applications to take direct advantage of features and advancements inherent to the device, you are, in essence, redefining data center storage architectures.

Now this is something to get “kinetic” about.