Seagate and SwiftStack team up

Following the release of Seagate’s Kinetic drive platform on October 22, SwiftStack announced its partnership with Seagate in developing support for its OpenStack Swift platform so that releases would be made available to the open source community – a community that Seagate has demonstrated strong support for through its cloud computing storage offerings.

SwiftStack provided a historical look at data storage in its recent blog post, noting that intelligence previously lived on the mainframe with drives physically connected. Over time, storage intelligence advanced, cloud storage began a period of rapid adoption and distributed systems became more widespread due to the use of storage controllers.

“Data storage requires processing power, and while CPU is no longer scarce on servers, storage controllers have evolved to optimize data availability and resiliency,” SwiftStack stated on its blog. “Network storage controllers have driven the current generation of storage architectures, and enabled an industry built on an increase in utilization and increased storage efficiency.”

SwiftStack also commented that with the evolving needs of application development, cloud builders are being called on to answer the demand for scalable storage architectures that enable more user data to be concentrated into fewer systems. Traditional storage systems simply do not have the design capabilities to cope with massive unstructured data growth.

The Seagate Kinetic platform is widely viewed across the industry as a driver of this new storage era, incorporating markedly different storage components than existing disk drive solutions. Specifically, it includes a new class of hard disk drives and Key Value API solid state drives, which utilize Ethernet over traditional drive interfaces that require physical attachment to storage servers. This “redefinition” of storage architectures leverages IP addresses to provide unprecedented scalability and efficiency for cloud storage systems that facilitate better cluster management and improved data replication in the increasingly prevalent multiple data center infrastructures.

Satisfying demand for scale-out cloud storage architecture
Largely due to the evolving storage scene, SwiftStack maintained that its partnership with Seagate was strategically orchestrated to empower top support for drives that are capable of scaling out rather than scaling up. By developing management capabilities that interoperate with the Kinetic platform, business users will be able to leverage the new technology with their infrastructure in a seamless manner so that storage clouds can be scaled easily. With a partnership like that of Seagate and SwiftStack, major technology players can empower businesses to stay abreast of the latest technological advances and take advantage of the most powerful innovations.

“Consumption of unstructured data by users continues to grow exponentially, fueling the need for enterprises and cloud providers to look at new storage architectures with improved cost, flexibility, and scale,” said SwiftStack CEO Joe Arnold, speaking of the company’s partnership with Seagate. “Understanding the clear benefits that Kinetic technology can provide to customers of our software-defined storage, SwiftStack is excited to work on this project with Seagate, and we look forward to the new levels of efficiency in this scale-out architecture that will reduce overall costs for our customers.”

SwiftStack has long emphasized the need for enterprise cloud storage architectures that are capable of scaling out rather than scaling up, endeavors which can benefit from open source technologies such as OpenStack Object Storage. In a release about its partnership with Seagate, SwiftStack noted that its private cloud storage customers will be able to enjoy new levels of discovery, provisioning and managing when it comes to Kinetic devices that serve as part of their storage clusters. The recent developments surrounding SwiftStack and Seagate allows a Kinetic drive to leveraged as a unit of measure in cloud storage, and that the breakthrough technology enables the reduction of cloud hardware with the simultaneous introduction of new efficiency levels.

2013-11-04T18:29:48+00:00

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