Seagate quietly bins open storage project

Seagate has stopped work on its “Kinetic” open storage project.

Kinetic was advanced as a way to scale storage by giving disk drives their own Ethernet ports, so that applications could source data direct from a drive without the need for them to be housed in an array or server. Seagate suggested this arrangement would move data more quickly than is possible when using dedicated storage hardware, while also simplifying data centres by removing the need for storage networks.

Seagate built some Kinetic drives and created an alliance to create a supporting software stack, with the intention of having software-defined storage applications address the drives. The company won some support for Kinetic, even signing Brisbane cloud operator Digital Sense to run a Kinetic testbed.

But CRN has learned that the company has walked away from the project, on grounds that its aim of bringing data and servers closer together can best be achieved by other means.

The company’s executive VP and head of operations Jeff Nygaard and senior vice president for product development engineering Mike Troemel today told CRN that Seagate continues to work on similar ideas, but that it is no longer pursuing Kinetic as a discrete project.

Support is still available for Kinetic drives.