Kinetic HDDs...not much to show so far
Well, it was exciting to see the video of Mr. James Hughes from Seagate present and demo a Seagate Kinetic HDD at the RICON West Conference (Basho Riak) in San Francisco in October, 2013. Every OBS software vendor had a comment about Kinetic...a few were interested and willing to investigate it, while others were not convinced that Kinetic worked any better than what they were already doing with their OBS clusters.
So, here we are almost three years later and no production quality deployments of Kinetic at scale. Maybe OpenIO is on to something, but it looks more like an engineering project right now. Maybe it will be "insanely great" and maybe it won't.
In the meantime, every OBS software vendor wants to deliver their OBS software to solve current customer storage and data management problems at scale. No customer is going to wait another couple of years to see if Kinetic works as originally conceived by Mr. Hughes at Seagate. In fact, most customers using OBS software don't really care much about the hardware that does the storage. What they care about more is the cost of the storage and the ecosystem of solutions they can choose from to solve their data storage and management problems. From this perspective it is all about S3 and using OBS software on commodity hardware, and deploying it with the fewest headaches possible. A tricked-out Kinetic HDD without the OBS application software is useless. It is all about the OBS software.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
