Seagate shifts the economics of Cloud Computing

Introduced in 2013, the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform has garnered broad industry support from cloud and enterprise customers, as well as software and hardware systems partners, including AOL, Digital Sense, and Hewlett Packard, which have collaborated to support the open Kinetic API and helped to enable this new storage technology to come to market.

“Over the past decade, the unprecedented explosion of data has been driven by social media, smartphones, tablets, and the rapid growth of every sort of Internet-connected device,” said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. “Cloud service providers (CSPs) are increasingly looking for solutions that will simplify infrastructure, improve scalability and reduce costs— Kinetic HDD addresses these needs revolutionizing the data storage economics for today’s cloud and beyond.”
The Kinetic Open Storage platform dramatically simplifies large-scale storage architectures by eliminating the overhead of an entire storage server tier, which in turn lowers equipment costs. Fewer number of storage servers also reduces power consumption and headcount expenses associated with managing storage, resulting in lower operating costs, for a combined savings of up to 50 percent.

“The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform is a compelling technology that has the potential to empower data centers with more scalable solutions at an industry-low TCO,” said Dave Reinsel, IDC’s group vice president for storage and semiconductors. “Seagate’s move into this space is a strategic addition to its core storage business as it aligns with the open community, as well as with the needs of CSPs that are looking for new architectures to manage their vast and growing lakes of data.”

“The Kinetic Open Storage platform will help AOL improve data center efficiency by reducing the number of servers required to store data for modern scale out applications,” said Dan Pollack, chief architect - storage operations for AOL. “The addition of Kinetic devices to the storage environment creates architectural flexibility when deploying systems. Kinetic storage also improves TCO when storing the enormous data sets required by applications, while simplifying management and reducing the effort required to operate reliable data storage systems.”

“HP is working closely with Seagate in our exploration of Ethernet connected drives. At HP, we focus on continually driving meaningful innovation in big data solutions and believe Kinetic technology could have a significant impact on the way data intense applications operate in the future,” Jimmy Daley, director, modular compute and storage at HP.

The Kinetic Open Storage platform improves drive and rack level performance by eliminating the need for legacy file systems and shifting HDD storage media space management to the drive itself. It delivers a streamlined architecture allowing storage applications to talk directly to Kinetic object storage HDDs. Performance is further enhanced by eliminating storage server bottlenecks via direct IP addressing of each drive, thereby improving system level throughput.

The platform enables servers and storage to be scaled independently and developed more rapidly. Cloud data centers can add servers and storage at entirely different rates, matching each precisely to their needs. In addition, HDD innovation can progress more rapidly as servers and operating systems are shielded from device changes through the Kinetic open source API.

“The TCO works out amazingly! We are seeing up to a 75 percent reduction in costs as compared to our current storage systems. As such, we strongly believe we have a far more competitive and cost-efficient cloud offering for our customers,” said Michael Tran, CTO, Digital Sense.

“Our core mandate is to develop turn-key solutions that accommodate compute, network and storage components for private infrastructures,” said Takashi Sogabe, lead engineer service development section, application development product division of Internet Initiative Japan. “With this in mind, we are currently evaluating the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform. These drives coupled with object storage deliver optimum applications in terms of flexibility, scalability and efficiency— a winning combination that will enable us to deliver unparalleled apps in the very near future.”