Seagate Technology has introduced its first Kinetic-series hard disk drives for cloud storage applications. The Kinetic HDDs come with their own built-in operating system and can be plugged directly to Ethernet ports, thus, eliminating multiple layers of legacy software and hardware infrastructure.

Seagate Kinetic hard drive features 4TB capacity, dual SGMII Ethernet 1Gb/s ports, an application processor, 512MB of RAM, 64MB of cache as well as its own micro operating system that is a part of Kinetic Open Storage platform. The micro-OS manages storage media space itself and does not require any legacy file system or even a host server, which greatly simplifies modern storage platforms. Since every Kinetic hard drive is essentially a micro-server, storage applications now need to “talk” directly to Kinetic object storage HDDs, not to host servers. Performance is further enhanced by eliminating storage server bottlenecks via direct IP addressing of each drive, thereby improving system level throughput.

According to Seagate, its Kinetic platform (and Kinetic HDD) enables servers and storage to be scaled independently and developed more rapidly. Cloud data centers can add servers and storage at entirely different rates, matching each precisely to their needs. This reduces TCO, improves performance and adds flexibility. Moreover, this lets Seagate to incorporate future HDD innovations without host software changes as servers and operating systems are shielded from device changes through the Kinetic open source API.