Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform Targets Cloud
Seagate, one of the world's dominant storage drive manufacturers, announced the Kinetic Open Storage Platform, a set of APIs and an architectural approach that promises to eliminate much of the complexity and cost of today's bloated storage infrastructure mainly by putting Ethernet right onto the company's drives and adding a key-value model for data management.
The move is designed to help Seagate capture some of the explosive cloud-based object storage market, or put in the company's more lofty verbiage, to "fundamentally redefine the full stack for scale-out object storage," according to Ali Fenn, Seagate's senior director of advanced storage.
With Kinetic, Seagate is targeting storage use cases that consist largely of unstructured data (like NoSQL, Hadoop and other distributed file systems), and object stores in the cloud (like Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift and Basho's Riak). These are typically areas where scaling out means spending more money on more storage servers to manage more drives, and the increased complexity those components introduce.
Ironically, these challenges also exist in enterprise data centers, and hybrid cloud storage solutions are quickly emerging as a solution; there's nothing like kicking a scalability problem up to the cloud, where it's more economically managed. "Does it ultimately turn out to be cost effective?" asked Howard Marks, founder and chief scientist at DeepStorage; "I think it will."
Kinetic is fundamentally a way for storage applications to communicate directly with storage devices over Ethernet. Kinetic consists of APIs and libraries for cloud storage stacks and storage applications. These APIs handle the complexity typically introduced by the myriad file systems, volume managers, fiber channel interfaces, storage servers, drive connections and so on. Essentially all of the controller functions happen in software, and large data sets move directly to storage.
"It's an interesting shift in intelligence to the drive," said Marks, who also said that the disk drive is "perfectly designed to hold these object stores."

At introduction, Kinetic will include a simulator, the software library, access to the APIs, and working code for Riak and Swift, which Fenn said are the biggest, most obvious scale-out use cases. The goal for now is to start up the developer ecosystem.
Drives will come next year, starting with Seagate's Nearline offerings, expanding from there. The devices will each get two 1 Gbps ports, Fenn said, and that will expand to 10 Gbps when the industry moves that way. In a written e-mail response, Fenn said that Seagate "fully expects and anticipates that other device manufacturers will add Ethernet and implement the Kinetic API."
Fenn said that with Kinetic, the typical limitations of hard drives per storage server, or storage servers per rack, go away.
"Today, you need a server running Swift for every 20 - 30 disk drives... to maintain some of the metadata," said Howard Marks. "Moving to a key-value model lets you offload a bunch of that." Cloud providers could put as much as 200 drives behind each server in a scale-out object store, Marks said.
Fenn also claimed that benchmarking should demonstrate better random write performance, because data is streamed to disk as it's written; in other words, file system queuing isn't getting in the way, since the application is communicating in keys and values to the drive. The drive is performing space management, and the elimination of all of this overhead will help cloud providers that need I/O scaling.
Seagate's own market research shows that at the end of the last decade, 62% of the storage shipped was into the client part of the buying market, with only about 25% of it in the cloud. By 2020, 56% of it will be in the cloud; and that percentage will clearly be of a larger pie, an estimated 7.3 ZetaBytes of about 13 ZetaBytes.
Seagate is targeting Tier 1 cloud service providers with Kinetic, and Fenn said the scheme has strong support from SwiftStack and Basho. The company's slide deck for Kinetic lists Yahoo, Rackspace, Dell, Xyratex, Huawei, Sanmina/Newisys and Hyve as "fellow travelers."
For Seagate, Kinetic changes the conversation from storage devices, which drive a lion's share of the company's revenues, to architecture. There's more money to be made by being higher up in the value chain. "If you're Seagate," said Marks, "the percentage of the total storage system that is disk drive has been shrinking," with more value attributed to the software and controller layer. He added that "the R&D costs of clever software are relatively low, compared to clever hardware."
Seagate doesn't shy away from its biggest challenge: "Seagate needs to innovate beyond the drive," said Fenn.
Clearly Seagate is betting on the cloud for its next innovations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fritz Nelson is Editor-in-Chief of Tom's IT Pro and Tom's Hardware. Previously he was the editorial director of the InformationWeek Business Technology Network, which included 12 editorial brands, like InformationWeek, Dark Reading, and Dr. Dobb's. As an industry expert with more than 20 years of editorial experience, Fritz writes about myriad technology issues -- from software to mobile to cloud to social business -- and meets regularly with CIOs and business leaders of the major technology companies. Earlier in his career, Fritz worked with Lockheed Martin's Computing Standards group, a team that tested and evaluated technology and whose objective was to set corporate computing and networking standards.
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