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Disks with Ethernet ports? Throw in some flash and you've got yourself a HGST p-a-r-t-y

Accepts net-drives are coming, follows Seagate

Western Digital Corp subsidiary HGST is developing Ethernet-connected drives for OpenStack users – and they won't require any application software changes, apparently.

The architecture of such a product will be demonstrated by HGST at the OpenStack Summit, to take place between 12 and 16 May in Atlanta, GA.

The presentation will show how data centres can, HGST claims, “run new and existing applications distributed directly onto hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) for next generation big data processing, analytics, research queries and other applications that require long-term retention of active data.”

This design “has integrated CPU and memory resources running Linux, and can be mixed with existing data centre infrastructure, allowing applications the option to run as close to the storage resource layer as possible”, we're told.

In contrast to Seagate’s Ethernet drives HGST says software such as OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift), Ceph and Red Hat Storage Server (aka Gluster), can run without modification. This aspect will be included in demonstration at the OpenStack Summit.

OpenStack Summit

Glossy invite ... the OpenStack Summit 2014

HGST claims “an open approach gives developers the flexibility they prefer and require to take advantage of Ethernet drives versus forcing them to modify their software to a vendor-specific API and architecture.”

Seagate’s Ethernet drives, branded Kinetic, have a direct network interface and object style API access to replace the existing application-to-drive storage stack.

HGST’s inclusion of SSDs as potential Ethernet drives is logical. Mario Blandini, the biz's senior director of marketing, will give a talk on HGST’s Ethernet drive ideas at the summit. ®

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