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back to article OpenIO wants to turn your spinning rust into object storage nodes

Frog object storage startup OpenIO is banging on with supporting Seagate’s Kinetic disk drives, and has certified its software on the drives in a Kinetic Plugfest. Ethernet-addressed Kinetic disk drives implement a Get, Put-based object storage facility at the drive level and, Seagate says, this allows accessing systems to …

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  1. random_graph

    "Any Application"?

    There's a chicken and egg problem here. By definition, object storage has taken advantage of local file-systems on X86 hosts to store chunks across naive disk drives. This provides the advantage of portability and the economies of "off-the-shelf" hardware. So capacity balancing, healing, namespace management, tiering, etc are all handled at the solution/cluster level. Are designs like Isilon, Cleversafe, Caringo, etc really going to deprecate any of this to the drive component? The only real advantage I see at the system level is that the "host" mostly goes away as a fault-domain. But the huge disadvantage is the economy of scale penalty for these low-volume drives. Naturally Seagate wants margin dollars to shift from hosts to drives, but is it enough to be compelling at the system level when the system still needs to support host-style nodes??

    Oh and no freaking way would this HTTP-based solution support "any application". Talk about throwing credibility out the window.

    1 1 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this really sensible?

    OK, so you're looking at a 10,000 drive system to provide the capacity you need - sensible is perhaps the wrong word.

    You can either have 10,000 tiny on-disk controllers or 12 HA controller pairs on something like a NetApp FAS8080 EX (first search result, not an endorsement, other storage providers exist blah blah blah). Can it really be cheaper or more effective to duplicate all that controller logic so many times? When you're connecting 1000+ drives per controller in a standard system, is the cost/complexity of a storage controller node not more or less statistical noise?

    Plus as random_graph says, you can present the standard system as object storage for whizzy modern applications but also as block and file storage for less bleeding edge applications. I'll be sticking to standard SAS connectors for now.

    0 0 Reply
    1. DeepStorage
      Reply Icon

      Well yes 10,000 little controllers can be cheaper.

      A Kinnetic drive is a key-value store. Disk drives already have ARM processors to run the ECC, LBA, remapping Etc. The incremental cost of a little more memory and a couple more processors is a few dollars compared to $1000 for 12-24 drives for a server/controller.

      There's no reason you couldn't use a small KEY (say 20 bytes for SHA-1) and a 4KB value, and build a solidfire like CAS back end for any application.

      1 0 Reply
  3. Mark Hahn

    Any Kinetic drives in the wild?

    Are Kinetic drives even available anywhere? If Seagate were smart, they'd be making them widely available to capture mindshare. I'd probably buy one, personally, just to have a chance to test it. Building a real facility from them would be fun. And there's a significant market: the server-based object-storage types still struggle to make the results fast and cheap (which is always the goal, after all.)

    Seagate also needs to provide two Gb ports. Implementing a dual-port model not only matches the disk bandwidth better, but it lets us design for minimal points of failure. It would be interesting to know whether a commodity 48pt Gb (2-4 10G uplink) switch would deliver better performance than the usual SAS/expander backplane. Even cheap switch hardware delivers line-rate and impressively low latency.

    Kinetic SSD would be pretty silly, though unless the fabric were IB, and that wouldn't work well, price-wise.

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  4. cloudguy

    Kinetic will always have a brilliant future...

    Well, aside from OpenIO and its current testing of Seagate Kinetic HDDs, just who has written and deployed any production applications using Seagate Kinetic HDDs?

    Three years ago, Mr. James Hughes from Seagate presented the first public presentation and "demo" of a Seagate Kinetic HDD at Basho's technical conference in San Francisco. Mr. Hughes was on a mission with Kinetic to rid the storage world of the evils of POSIX and storage servers with their disk controllers.

    After the Kinetic announcement, there was the usual rush of supportive quotes from object-based storage vendors and storage hardware OEMs. SwiftStack, Scality, and Cleversafe said they were interested in Kinetic. Caringo indicated in a private message that they saw no advantage in Kinetic over their current technology. Cloudian said in a private conversation that Kinetic would require a "split brain" software development effort and the Seagate Kinetic code was not up to production quality. So what has happened after the initial enthusiasm and some cautious comments regarding Seagate Kinetic? The answer is not much. Seagate Kinetic remains a storage technology in search of applications using it in production level deployments. Seagate Kinetic will always have a brilliant future.

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