In late September, Seagate held its 2nd ‘Internet Industry Cloud Storage Summit’ in China within the city of Dunhuang. The event entitled “Cloud Brings Simplicity” was aimed at helping companies in the region understand the benefits of cloud computing and its commercial value.
In addition to participants from the vendor community the summit was also attended by industry media, which covered the event through published articles. This blog shares some of the key content from the summit through the journalists who attended.
In its description of the event ZDNet.com.cn characterized the overarching theme of the summit:
“Seagate hosted (the)…Summit in the only route on the ancient Silk Road, Dunhuang, Gansu Province. It’s known that the strategic route in the coming years of Seagate, as a traditional HDD provider, is to build a Silk Road from HDDs to cloud and datacenter.”
Seagate’s familiarity with China’s Gansu Province in western China is evidenced by a notable customer – that of Dunhuang City itself. In its account of that partnership 51CTO offered details about the significance of the summit’s location:
“…Dunhuang City is a client of Seagate’s. The Dunhuang Council is trying hard to prevent the mural painting from time and nature via electronic edition photos and tapes and keep 45,000 squares of mural painting and 2,000 ancient Buddha sculptures in the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, while the council is hoping to show China’s historic treasure to the whole world by Internet. The council chose Seagate HDDs for E-storage and use Seagate’s technology to support the culture heritage preservation work.”
With storage needs continually spiraling upward the timing of an event, to this audience, focused on how to leverage the cloud to meet these challenges was itself very significant. Journalists from Watchstor.com addressed these conditions by referencing an analyst report:
“According to a recent IDC report entitled the “Digital Universe in 2020” total storage usage will expand to 44 zettabytes (ZB) within the next six years. Of this amount, more than 60 percent is predicted to be stored in the cloud.”
For its part 51CTO expanded upon this same issue with the following commentary:
“More and more cloud service providers hope to further lower cloud computing costs and provide differentiated services through technology innovation. With the constant explosive growth of data storage needs and the constantly increasing costs of design, deployment, operation and support for datacenter, cloud service providers are faced with challenges of delivering the best quality services at the lowest total ownership costs. Every cloud service provider is trying its best to seek a more effective storage solution by reducing space and power consumption, including employing the latest generation of technology.”
“In the meantime, some new technologies were born under those trends, like big data technology. Seagate holds that, future data is like a gold ore which can benefit the IT industry in the future decades, being a precious asset to every single company in the world.”
Seagate’s Vice President of Global Marketing, Scott Horn was on hand to present to attendees. A key feature of his address was news of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform, the first device-based storage platform enabling independent software vendors (ISV) and cloud service provider (CSP), and enterprise customers to optimize scale-out file and object-based storage, delivering lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
In its piece ‘Seagate Starts A Silk Road of Cloud Computing’ ZDNet.com.cn offered the following editorial relating to Kinetic:
“In this summit, Seagate finally unveiled its newest Kinetic HDD… As Seagate sees, what makes Kinetic matter is that it reduces the system overhead of the overall storage server layer, expands autonomously and develops rapidly, successfully deploys to reduce costs of super-large datacenter environment. It’s estimated Seagate will positively communicate with cloud customers after the batch delivery of Kinetic solutions.”
To learn more about Kinetic or to contact Seagate in one of its Asia Pacific offices please visit the contact us page on our website.
