Open Source Partners Drive Seagate Innovation in Cloud Storage

Seagate (STX), the hard disk and storage-solution vendor, is hedging its bets on open cloud storage with the announcement this week of the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage. Together with channel partners that include the open source companies SwiftStack and Basho, Seagate wants to make cloud storage for OpenStack and other platforms faster and more efficient than ever.

According to the companies involved, the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform innovates by eliminating some of the barriers between cloud applications and storage, which speeds up communication and reduces deployment cost. Here’s an official description:

Seagate’s open source partner ecosystem is an important part of Kinetic deployment. Basho, which delivers open source distributed storage software, collaborated on the development of the platform. Its flagship product, the Riak NoSQL database, will be available as a storage system for Kinetic, adding efficiencies at the software level to complement those of the storage architecture, according to Basho.

Meanwhile, SwiftStack, which specializes in software-defined object storage and was a major contributor to the global-cluster storage features introduced last week in the latest version of OpenStack, Havana, is also partnering on Kinetic. Its contribution is ensuring the compabatibility of its OpenStack Swift storage system with Seagate’s platform. According to SwiftStack:

Kinetic is another example of how the open source cloud is becoming cheaper and more efficient every day. And partnerships across the channel, as Seagate’s collaboration with open source software vendors shows, are key to that improvement.