Seagate, Toshiba and several other technology firms have launched the Kinetic open storage platform for smart, low-overhead cloud object storage.
The alliance also includes Western Digital, Cisco, Cleversafe, Dell, DigitalSense, NetApp, Open vStorage, Red Hat and Scality.
The Kinect Open Storage Project is planned to be developed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with an aim to facilitate open source object storage on ethernet-enabled storage devices.
The Kinetic open storage platform is a new class of key/value Ethernet drives and developer tools that include an open application programming interface (API) and related libraries.
It is designed to offer simple semantic abstraction and allow a set of apps via easy-to-use APIs.
Seagate said the traditional paradigm of hardware-centric, file-based systems are being replaced with new software-defined, object-based approaches.
The company said: "The new paradigm is an object-oriented one: a world of pictures, movies, eCommerce and Web data, search, and games, and archives of all of these."
The objects, which mostly feature unstructured data are written, read and deleted but never modified.
The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform allows independent software vendors and cloud service providers, and enterprise customers to optimise scale-out file and object-based storage,
It features storage devices + key/value API + Ethernet connectivity. Seagate said the platform will address the inefficiencies of traditional data centres whose legacy architectures are not well-adapted to highly distributed and capacity-optimised workloads of exploding unstructured data and apps.
