News Seagate announces Ethernet-enabled storage platform

They may want to change the name fairly pronto, the Kinect bit may cause them issues with MSFT.

 

My bad, Read it wrong.

 

As Wikipedia would say... "Kinect is a portmanteau of kinetic and connect[citation needed]"

 

Definitely an interesting idea, but considering how cheap, cool, and powerful CPUs are getting, I think this is several years too late. Also, unless I'm not understanding something correctly, I feel like this would cause some serious overhead when it comes to redundancy.

Also, while I completely understand the reason to avoid the "middle section" of networking drives, wouldn't a NAS still be faster and more efficient when it comes to clusters of drives? So for example, wouldn't a NAS (using 1 ethernet port) with 6 drives give better performance than 6 drives each on their own ethernet port? Again, maybe I'm not understanding something correctly, I just think this idea is really only good for small amounts of very temporary storage.

 

So you're going to take away my dumb disks which I put into servers running an open source operating system and next generation file system like ZFS, where redundant software-based arrays and checksuming keep my data safe - and instead put a proprietary firmware server on every single hard drive, with no redundancy to speak of.

No thanks, Seagate. No thank you.

 

Tell the customer to run around the room while holding it, problems solved

 

Finnaly a possible end to crap NAS boxes that barly manage to saturate a 100mbit link.

 

This certainly seems to be the way new storage is going. Software driven RAID sets at the data level instead of the hardware level. VMware and MS are already doing it in their hypervisors.

 

Took them over 10 years to do this. Btw, NAS is only slow if you buy those proprietary toy stuff. If you build one yourself, it can go beyond 1Gbps/s easily.

 

There are already several companies that use the word 'Kinetic' in their name along with Seiko's trademark for its automatic quartz technology as mentioned here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic

In all honesty though, I don't an issue arising any time soon.

 

It's an interesting idea, but what happens when the hardware holding the 'Software driven RAID set' fails?

 

The key point of the proposed technology is that this is not block storage as we surrently expect. It's a "Key Value Store" which more closely related to CAS (Content Addressed Storage) than even NAS. The type of scale out applications they are thinking of with this technology are in the space where FalconStore, BlueArc, HNAS, EMC Centerra etc occupy.
I'd hesitate to liken it to block accessible scale out storage like EMC Isilon, Data Domain or even HP StoreVirtual and Dell EqualLogic simply because its strictly non-block.
It's more likely this type of drive would be used behind an application server which forms a Reduntant Array of Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN) in the same way EMC Centerra does with its pizza-box servers.
I don't see much traction for them in the enterprise any time soon but I could be surprised like with ATA over Ethernet which has managed to persist for several years so far.

 

Yo monitor the hardware and software for faults. Build in 'hot-spares' and automatic recovery features; just like in any other enterprise storage platform.
I wouldn't let my company invest in something that was missing these types of feature unless there was a very specific usecase.