back to article SNIA examines standardised access to object-based disk drives

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has a tech workgroup looking at object-based disk drives, such as Seagate’s Kinetic product, and is aiming to standardise access. Seagate’s Kinetic disk drive has object-style Get and Put interfaces access over a direct Ethernet connection to the drive. HGST is developing its …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A solution in search of a problem?

    I really don't see any need driving this development work, please elucidate. Are not the existing protocols a "lock-in-free method of accessing the drives"?

    I'd welcome better, faster, more reliable hardware, but tacking an ethernet interface to a hard drive and standardizing a protocol (abstraction layer) to use it looks to me like they are trying to turn every hard disc into a NAS box, just add power-supply. This doesn't help me manage my storage, it doesn't improve storage performance, it doesn't make drives any more hot-swappable than the SATA drives I have in my server, it doesn't lessen network load (in fact it might increase it), and it doesn't improve reliability/longevity. So back to my original question, of what is the driving need behind this work?

    1. richardcox13

      Re: A solution in search of a problem?

      > looks to me like they are trying to turn every hard disc into a NAS box

      [without all the benefits]

      Indeed. Instead of open set of code managing redundancy (with a support contract), you end up with every application doing it. Mostly poorly (inevitably).

  2. CloudTWGchair

    Different Group

    I know it can be confusing, but the SNIA group that just recently formed for the Ethernet (and possibly other) Object Drives is the Object Drive Technical Work Group (TWG).

    What is driving this new architectural positioning is the scale out storage software that is able to add a drive at a time to scale performance, capacity and availability. It is a further dis aggregation of the white boxes doing this task today. Pushing the cpu and memory into the drives means a disk enclosure need only an Ethernet switch and power supplies/fans - no server component.

  3. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    The way!

    This means the drive becomes a NAS. Redundancy will have to be at the "object" level (really just array of bytes, possibly with added tags, amirite?). Any DRM extras?

    And does this means there needs to be a firewall on the disk interface lest random TLAs rustle the jimmies of your data center from inside?

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