Seagate on Monday unveiled a new Kinetic 4TB hard disk drive option aiming to replace legacy systems by conbining an open source object storage protocol with Ethernet connectivity, in order to eliminate multiple layers of legacy software and hardware infrastructure. Introduced in 2013, the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform has garnered industry support from AOL, Digital Sense, and Hewlett Packard, which have collaborated to support the open Kinetic API and helped to enable this new storage technology to come to market.

The Kinetic Open Storage platform simplifies large-scale storage architectures by eliminating the overhead of an entire storage server tier, which in turn lowers equipment costs. Fewer number of storage servers also reduces power consumption and headcount expenses associated with managing storage.

The platform improves drive and rack level performance by eliminating the need for legacy file systems and shifting HDD storage media space management to the drive itself. It delivers a streamlined architecture allowing storage applications to talk directly to Kinetic object storage HDDs. Performance is further enhanced by eliminating storage server bottlenecks via direct IP addressing of each drive, thereby improving system level throughput.

The platform enables servers and storage to be scaled independently. Cloud data centers can add servers and storage at entirely different rates, matching each to their needs.

The new 4TB Kinetic HDD model is available for customer qualification testing now. Seagate expects production-level drives to begin shipping by the end of November.

Seagate will demonstrate the Kinetic Open Storage platform at OpenStack Summit Paris 2014, LE PALAIS DES CONGRÈS, Paris, France.