Seagate Technology recently announced its partnership with distributed systems and cloud storage software expert Basho in the development of Seagate’s recently released Kinetic Open Storage platform. The partnership allowed Basho to build interoperability with its distributed NoSQL database, Riak, into the solution, expanding the potential that the cloud has to offer.
Riak was developed by Basho in order to provide businesses with distributed database that is also highly available and fault tolerant, which provides an easy to operate and simple to scale storage solution. Riak alone has numerous benefits for businesses, including built-in replication and multi-data center replication, predictable low latency, flexible storage, operational simplicity, real-time reporting and analytics capabilities, geo data locality and incremental scalability. Basho offers two distinct products: its scale-out distributed database, Riak, and its distributed object storage software with S3-compatibility, Riak CS. To take advantage of enterprise cloud storage solutions, businesses can leverage Riak, which utilizes consistent hashing, vector clocks, vnodes, hinted handoff and gossiping, read repair and anti-entropy capabilities to enable optimal access to and storage of corporate data.
These unique capabilities allow cloud computing storage to be scaled out, rather than up, a distinction that Basho emphasizes in detailing how linear scalability is what organizations truly need. The simplification of operations is also a major benefit of leveraging Riak.
The company noted that Riak is already used by thousands of businesses, including roughly a third of Fortune 50 firms. By partnering with Seagate, Basho intended to continue enhancing its enterprise offerings by enabling Riak to be deployed on the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform. The platform, which has been met with industry-wide accolades since its release roughly two weeks ago, has been noted to transform storage as it is known today.
“Seagate is bringing device based innovation to the scale-out cloud market in a new and open way,” said Ali Fenn, senior director of advanced storage at Seagate Technology. “This is a fundamentally new architecture – integrating an open source key/ value API and Ethernet connectivity into devices – that represents a vital leap forward in decreasing cloud architecture TCO while improving performance. We are very excited to work with Basho, a leader in distributed object storage software, to bring complete solutions to customers.”
Basho offers eKinetic driver
To facilitate the use of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform by businesses and developers, Basho released its eKinetic driver, which allows high-performance, Erlang-based socket connection to the drive. The company also explained that it is providing software that maps a Riak backend to the drive library.
With this interoperability, businesses can expect to increase I/O efficiency through the removal of bottlenecks and optimization of components such as data replication, migrations, active multi-data center performance and cluster management. These improvements are able to reduce total cost of operations by as much as 50 percent. Furthermore, Basho indicated that companies are capable of additionally reducing costs through maximizing storage density, which brings the added benefit of improved cooling and power costs.
“Basho’s distributed database relies on key/value stores directly attached to servers,” said Jon Meredith, senior vice president of engineering at Basho. “Seagate’s kinetic drive simplifies the management of key/value store, filesystem, logical volume manager, RAID controllers and actual devices by replacing them with a simple socket-based network interface. Freeing drives from a server chassis enables independent scaling of capacity and throughput of a cloud architecture. We look forward to continuing to work with Seagate to offer customers significant performance and cost benefits when combining Riak on kinetic drive technology.”
