Whomp, there it is: Seagate demos Kinetic disk drive Seagate is demonstrating its Kinetic disk drive at the OpenStack summit in Paris, claiming to have broad support for its proprietary, single-source technology. Kinetic is a disk drive directly addressed over Ethernet using Get and Put-style object storage commands using an open source API. The idea is that applications can …
Are these Ethernet addressed drives sitting on the network, like a bunch of little NAS's?
Not quite NAS, as the device gives you a disk-like interface[1], rather than a file-based one.
So rather like AoE or iSCSI, really...
Vic.
[1] Albeit one based on variable-sized objects referenced by token, rather than fixed-sized blocks.
Yeah, an application can write an object, key and other metadata straight to a Kinetic drive over a TCP connection, and retrieve it directly from the drive. Think Amazon S3 instead of a piece of block storage.
Making that scale is a simple matter of partitioning drives so that different tenants' key spaces are distinct, managing tenant authentication and space allocation on all the drives, locating drives with free space, keeping track of which drives you wrote copies of any object to, and notifying client applications when drives die so that they can do the needed replication from existing copies to re-establish the correct number and placement of replicas.
Ehem. So, *don't* think Amazon S3, actually... because if you buy Kinetics, you have to implement most of what S3 does in the layer above the Kinetic drives. If you were planning to do that anyway though, hey, Kinetic drives might be a decent fit. You could probably achieve much the same with AoE drives by moving a bit more intelligence into the layer above the Kinetic drives. Shingled recording means that the Kinetic drive is treating each shingle zone a bit like a huge flash erase zone, with objects getting appended to a shingle zone and then garbage collected to other zones when the fraction of live data in a full zone drops too low. There's no inherent reason those zone allocations needs to be tracked on each drive rather than on a server.
So where is the table that contains all the ID"s kept: on a local harddrive? That's the bit nobody in any article that I've read is talking about. I get the whole key/value bit, but that information has to be stored in a non-volatile environment somewhere.
"Seagate says its fancy drive is getting support from various respectable businesses like AOL"
AOL? Really? I mean AOL backing this product is enough reason NOT to want it all by itself. If AOL is interested, it MUST have fail writen all over it.
Seriously, you owe me a new keyboard after writing something like that.
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