Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

JFS file system, and the only access we then allow to this totally self-contained storage building block is through HTTPS running custom Backblaze application layer logic in Apache Tomcat 5.5. After taking all this into account, the formatted (useable) space is 87 percent of the raw hard drive totals. One of the most important concepts here is that to store or retrieve data with a Backblaze Storage Pod, it is always through HTTPS. There is no iSCSI, no NFS, no SQL, no Fibre Channel.

http://pl.atyp.us/2013-10-comedic-open-storage.html

I tried to post a comment on the NSOP (Not So...), but first I got "HTTP internal error" and then I got "duplicate comment" but it still hasn't shown up, so I'll post it here.

"The “private” bit is important; although various techniques have been created for shared (multi-master) access to the interconnect, all were relatively expensive, and none are supported by the consumer-grade drives which are often used for scale-out storage systems."

I was working on multi-master storage systems using parallel SCSI in 1994. Nowadays you can get an FC or SAS disk array for barely more than a JBOD enclosure. Shared storage is neither new nor expensive. It's not common at the single-disk layer, but it's not clear why that should matter.

The idea of network disks with an object interface isn't all that new either. NASD (http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/NASD/Talks/Seagate-Dec-14-99....) did it back in '99, and IMO did it better (see http://pl.atyp.us/2013-10-comedic-open-storage.html for the longer explanation.

"Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this means we’ll see thousand upon thousands of individual smart disks on the data center LANs. That’s not the goal."

...and yet that's exactly what some of the "use cases" in the Kinetics wiki show. Is it your statement that's incorrect, or the marketing materials Seagate put up in lieu of technical information?

"they don’t have to use one kind of (severely constrained) technology for one kind of traffic (disk data) and a completely different kind of technology for their internal HA traffic."

How does Kinetic do anything to help with HA? Array vendors are not particularly constrained by the interconnects they're using now. In the "big honking" market, Ethernet is markedly inferior to the interconnects they're already using internally, and doesn't touch any of the other problems that constitute their value add - efficient RAID implementations, efficient bridging between internal and external interfaces (regardless of the protocol used), tiering, fault handling, etc. If they want to support a single-vendor object API instead of several open ones that already exist, then maybe they can do that more easily or efficiently with the same API on the inside. Otherwise it's just a big "meh" to them.

At the higher level, in distributed filesystems or object stores, having an object store at the disk level isn't going to make much difference either. Because the Kinetics semantics are so weak, they'll have to do for themselves most of what they do now, and performance isn't constrained by the back-end interface even when it's file based. Sure, they can connect multiple servers to a single Kinetics disk and fail over between them, but they can do the same with a cheap dual-controller SAS enclosure today. The reason they typically don't is not because of cost but because that's not how modern systems handle HA. The battle between shared-disk and shared-nothing is over. Shared-nothing won. Even with an object interface, going back to a shared-disk architecture is a mistake few would make.

First of all: Hyperscale? I'm not a retarded non-technical manager or MBO, so I just stopped listening to your entire pitch. Second: You're still selling storage infrastructure, and I still have to support it. The expense just has a different name now.

"Companies can realize additional cost savings while maximizing storage density through reduced power and cooling costs, and receiving potentially dramatic savings in cloud data center build outs."

How does reducing my power and cooling costs maximize my storage density? Oh, by getting me to spend more money on your product instead of power and cooling. Nice try, buddy; give me the cost comparison or stfu.

Their whole pitch here is "throw away your key/value servers and use our key/value server instead". I wonder which will be more expensive: something I throw together with commodity PCs, or a SAN developed by Seagate.