Seagate Kinetic HDDs Eliminate Need for File Systems

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Seagate this week unveiled a hard disk drive that comes with object-based software that promises to reduce much of the complexity and overhead associated with managing data storage at scale.

Ali Fenn, senior director of product line management for Seagate, says Seagate Kinetic HDDs eliminate the need for file systems by moving space management of the drive off the server and on to the drive itself. Seagate then exposes an open source application programming interface (API) that it previously offered to developers to allow them to directly access data stored on the Seagate Kinetic HDDs.

The drives themselves also sport a native Ethernet interface that drives up the level of I/O performance by several orders of magnitude while driving a 50 percent reduction in the total cost of storing data, says Fenn.

Most cloud service providers already make use of object-based storage systems to manage data at scale. But by applying object management capabilities to the drive themselves, Seagate is making it more feasible for enterprise IT organizations to begin moving away from file systems, especially as they begin  to embrace NoSQL databases based on a key/value architecture.

At a time when IT organizations are struggling with managing more data than ever, any technology advances that reduce the overhead of managing storage while increasing performance will be welcomed.

But given the number of legacy applications that still depend on file systems, it’s not likely that the average IT organization is going to be done with managing file systems any time soon.