Seagate Teams with Toshiba, WD for Kinetic Open Storage Project

  • Kinetic Open Storage Platform

Seagate is helping to lead an effort to drive open-source standards for Kinetic hard drives. The company is joined by a group of leading industry players that include storage competitors Toshiba and WD, as well as Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, NetApp, Huawei and other tech powerhouses.

The Linux Foundation on Monday announced a new collaborative effort, the Kinetic Open Storage Project, which also includes Swiftstack, Cleversafe, DigitalSense, OpenvStorage, and Scality among its founding members.

What you need to know - Kinetic Open Storage PlatformThe Seagate-created Kinetic Open Storage Platform is the first Ethernet-connected key/value drive with an open-source object API (application program interface) designed for hyperscale and scale-out environments. Kinetic is a revolutionary approach to storage in that it can eliminate the need for traditional storage architectures—storage applications can talk directly to disk drives via Ethernet. That means simplified storage environments, with fewer servers and reduced costs.

The goal of the project is to create an open-source model for accessing and managing Kinetic drives, allowing other companies to more easily introduce Kinetic technology and develop applications to leverage the advantage of Kinetic drives.

“Thriving Ecosystem”

The idea is to make the Kinetic technology “the de facto standard for Ethernet cloud drives and develop a thriving ecosystem,” said Shai Tsur, senior business development manager at Seagate.

“The Kinetic drives rely on an ecosystem of companies,” Tsur explained. “You need all the pieces working together in order for people to make use of the drives. This will make it easier to build out that ecosystem.”

David Burks, director of product management for Kinetic products at Seagate, said the company had always planned on getting its Kinetic technology into the collective hands of the open-source community to accelerate its adoption.

Seagate Kinetic HDD“This is really the culmination of that plan,” Burks said. “We think that by offering this technology to the open-source community, the Kinetic platform will really expand in terms of its functionality. It will be propagated in an environment where innovation happens quickly.”

“The partners that have signed onto this project include all the leading object-storage companies,” Tsur added, “so we have a lot of confidence that this will help spur adoption of Kinetic drives.”

Linux Foundation a Good Fit

Burks added that the Linux Foundation is a good fit for hosting the Kinetic technology because of its deep experience in managing open-source projects, with a licensing structure that “accommodates a lot of different companies—both hardware and software.”

The new project will manage open-source libraries, APIs, and drive simulators.

Having hard drive competitors like WD and Toshiba as contributing members is “good for the entire ecosystem,” added Burks. Toshiba has its own version of the Kinetic drive and will contribute new features, code fixes and more to the project.

“This brings a new Kinetic drive supplier to the table, a second source for OEMs,” he explained. “That gives the technology a lot of credibility. Toshiba helps validate the idea that Kinetic as an Ethernet standard has legs. And while it’s true that Toshiba and WD are our competitors, we do collaborate with them on things like traditional command sets, so this project isn’t any different in that way.”

2015-08-20T00:44:46+00:00

About the Author: