Seagate’s Hard Drive for Cloud Storage

Seagate has introduced a new range of hard drives named Kinetic designed for usage in cloud storage infrastructure and Software Defined Storage. Previously, we have talked about Cloud Storage Gateway, Software Defined Storage, where the possibility of integrating high end SSD Hard Drives has been discussed as tomorrow’s technology. Seagate’s Hard Drive for Cloud Storage is under Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform which delivers higher performance.

Seagate’s Hard Drive for Cloud Storage and Kinetic Open Storage Platform

Kinetic drive implements the Kinetic API that enables key-value object storage. The product has a capacity of 4TB, 2 SGMII 1GB / s (IP address associated with each device) ethernet ports, a processor for applications, 512MB of RAM and 64MB of cache. The Kinetic drive replaces the Serial Advance Technology Attachment (SATA) or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. The main advantage of the solution lies in the fact of being able to bypass the host server – each hard disk in fact, also has its own miniature operating system, it operates as if is a sort of micro-server and is able to independently manage the available space.

You can read about Kinetic Open Storage Platform on their official Wiki :

Seagate’s Hard Drive for Cloud Storage and Total Cost of Ownership

Kinetic connects directly with the Apps, not with the host server, avoiding unwanted bottlenecks of traditional storage server – this will, according to their sayings, result in an overall increase in performance (up to 4 times I/O performance) compared to the traditional solutions.

According to Seagate, the Kinetic (whose APIs are open source) platform will enable to scale regardless of the servers and storage and complete a variety of tasks in less time – this will benefit the datacenter by offering greater operational flexibility (every Kinetic hard disk is accessible from the network, developers can use cloud APIs and tools to design innovative architectures cloud storage), giving a general incremental performance and up to 50% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).

According to Seagate, in the last decade, the increased need of data storage has been driven by social networks, smartphones, tablet PCs and the rapid spread of all manner of devices connected to the Internet. The cloud service providers are increasingly looking for solutions that simplify infrastructure, improving scalability and reducing costs. Hard drives Kinetic meet these needs revolutionizing costs in the cloud data storage.