Seagate opens Kinetic platform to its rivals

Seagate's Kinectic Open Storage Platform, an Ethernet-enabled system it claimed would revolutionise the data centre storage industry, is now a truly open standard, featuring input from industry giants including Toshiba, Western Digital, and Cisco.

Announced back in 2013, the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform was claimed to offer a serious efficiency boost for data centres. By placing Ethernet connectivity directly into its storage devices, powered by a series of open programming interface (APIs) which allow for direct drive-to-drive data transfers without going through a central controlling system, the company promised that the Kinetic platform would do away with cost and performance bottlenecks associated with large storage area networks (SANs.) At the time, it claimed it had two major enterprise storage software vendors on-board, but was quiet about launch dates and availability of hardware.

Now, the company has announced that it is truly opening the doors to the Kinetic platform. Placing it under the Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project, Kinetic is now being developed by Seagate alongside rivals Toshiba and Western Digital, as well as networking giants Cisco, Dell, and numerous other companies. The project's released specifications include both the hardware side, with the integrated Ethernet connectivity, and the software side with the key/value storage platform which makes the clever efficiency gains possible. '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,' as the company puts it in the technology's promotional details.

As with its previous announcements, however, there is little yet that companies can add to their data centres - beyond the promises available in its technology write-up.