Seagate close to open-sourcing Kinetics object storage platform

Seagate will hand over some of its Kinetic Storage platform to the world at the coming OpenStack summit in Vancouver, Canada, The Register has learned. Kinetic is the object storage platform Seagate has built to make it possible to so useful work with its Ethernet-equipped disk drives. Seagate's ambition is to cut arrays out …

[jelabarre59]

standalone OSD

I wonder how readily these drives could be attached to a Ceph cluster? I had a wild idea of using RaspberryPI (or something similar) SBCs as a host for a single disk/OSD under Ceph. If the Kinetics drives had enough capability, this could be another method; just have the "monitor" hosts on regulatr systems, then split the disks out to separate power supplies, racks, etc to get redundancy. Perhaps the Kinetics drives could have 2 ethernet connections for redundancy.

[ManOnTheHill]

Re: standalone OSD

You need to look at the Kinetics documentation (it is available at the Seagate website). The Kinetics stuff actually implements an object store for the Ethernet attached drives, and will do HA and so forth on them. I don't know how easy it would be to make a Ceph cluster out of them (haven't spent much time looking at how Ceph uses drives).

I suspect that Ceph would be better served by the HGST version of this, called Open Ethernet Drive Architecture, which simply pushes a Linux distro down into the Ethernet-attached drive, where you can do whatever you want with it. So maybe each drive can become a member of the Ceph cluster...

Oh, and the drives that I've seen all have the standard SATA/SASA connector with Ethernet mapped to them, and implement the SAS-style multiple connections for the single connector.