Seagate (STX), the hard disk and storage-solution vendor, is hedging its bets on open cloud storage with the announcement this week of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage. Together with channel partners that include the open source companies SwiftStack and Basho, Seagate wants to make cloud storage for OpenStack and other platforms faster and more efficient than ever.

Christopher Tozzi, Contributing Editor

October 23, 2013

2 Min Read
Open Source Partners Drive Seagate Innovation in Cloud Storage

Seagate (STX), the hard disk and storage-solution vendor, is hedging its bets on open cloud storage with the announcement this week of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage. Together with channel partners that include the open source companies SwiftStack and Basho, Seagate wants to make cloud storage for OpenStack and other platforms faster and more efficient than ever.

According to the companies involved, the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform innovates by eliminating some of the barriers between cloud applications and storage, which speeds up communication and reduces deployment cost. Here’s an official description:

The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform eliminates the storage server tier of traditional data center architectures by enabling applications to speak directly to the storage system, thereby reducing expenses associated with the acquisition, deployment, and support of hyper scale storage infrastructures. The platform leverages Seagate’s expertise in hardware and software storage systems integrating an open source API and Ethernet connectivity with Seagate hard drive technology.

Seagate’s open source partner ecosystem is an important part of Kinetic deployment. Basho, which delivers open source distributed storage software, collaborated on the development of the platform. Its flagship product, the Riak NoSQL database, will be available as a storage system for Kinetic, adding efficiencies at the software level to complement those of the storage architecture, according to Basho.

Meanwhile, SwiftStack, which specializes in software-defined object storage and was a major contributor to the global-cluster storage features introduced last week in the latest version of OpenStack, Havana, is also partnering on Kinetic. Its contribution is ensuring the compabatibility of its OpenStack Swift storage system with Seagate’s platform. According to SwiftStack:

These development contributions will be available to the open source community to benefit new deployments and expand today’s implementations. Additionally, SwiftStack private cloud storage customers will be able to discover, provision, and manage Kinetic devices as part of their storage clusters. A Kinetic drive becomes a new unit of measure in cloud storage, serving as a storage node itself in a SwiftStack cluster. This breakthrough reduces a tier of node hardware and creates an opportunity for efficiency and density not possible with traditional architectures.

Kinetic is another example of how the open source cloud is becoming cheaper and more efficient every day. And partnerships across the channel, as Seagate’s collaboration with open source software vendors shows, are key to that improvement.

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About the Author(s)

Christopher Tozzi

Contributing Editor

Christopher Tozzi started covering the channel for The VAR Guy on a freelance basis in 2008, with an emphasis on open source, Linux, virtualization, SDN, containers, data storage and related topics. He also teaches history at a major university in Washington, D.C. He occasionally combines these interests by writing about the history of software. His book on this topic, “For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution,” is forthcoming with MIT Press.

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