Seagate Launches Kinetic Open Storage Platform

Seeking to redefine cloud storage infrastructure, Seagate Technology (STX) developed its Kinetic Open Storage Platform, which simplifies data management, improves performance and scalability, all while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) of average cloud infrastructures. The company announced the platform Tuesday.

“With the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform, our internal R&D teams have designed an unique, first-of-its-kind storage architecture to enable cheaper, more scalable object storage solutions that free up IT professionals from having to invest in hardware and software they don’t need,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. “This technology optimizes storage solutions for a new era of cloud storage systems, while drastically reducing overall costs.”

In the new platform, applications to speak directly to the storage device, eliminating the storage server tier of traditional data center architectures. The platform leverages Seagate’s expertise in hardware and software storage systems to integrate a new key/value API - which will be open sourced - and Ethernet connected with Seagate hard drive technology. It can be deployed across a range of storage devices enabling system builders and software developers to design new solutions that will deliver against a full array of cloud data center use cases. With the Kinetic Open Storage platform, applications can now manage specific features and capabilities and rapidly implement and deploy in any cloud storage software stack.

"At Yahoo, we’re always looking for new ways to improve efficiency and simplicity of our infrastructure and we’re excited about Seagate's Kinetic Open Storage platform," said Kevin Graham, principle storage architect, Yahoo Infrastructure Group. "Industry has proven time and again that Ethernet always wins, seeing this down to the drive level is a fantastic optimization.”

Industry Support

Showing support for the new technologies, several companies have announced that they are developing on the platform. “We are excited to integrate this technology into our products as we believe that an open platform such as this is the future of storage,” said Steve Ichinaga, senior vice president and general manager for Hyve Solutions. “Implementing Seagate’s new Kinetic technology means we can design and build industry-leading platforms that deliver truly optimized solutions for our web-scale customers.”

Aaron Sullivan, principal engineer at Rackspace, said, “We are excited about Seagate's Kinetic Open Storage platform and the potential it has to make open storage technology even more compelling. There is tremendous growth in the cloud storage solutions market and it is great that Seagate shares the same passion for open standards that Rackspace does.”

“Dell is the leader in hyperscale data center solutions because we’re intently focused on delivering cost-effective solutions, tailored to address our customers’ workloads and maximize application performance, and the Seagate Open Source Kinetic platform helps us on that mission,” said Tracy Davis, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions group. “By implementing Kinetic technology into our customers’ hyperscale environments, we are providing them with highly scalable solutions that reduce storage complexity and cost through increased integration.”