Seagate is making its way into the object storge business with a new software solution named CORTX. The hard drive maker has ambitions to build a developer community that will deal in open source software. They have published a reference architecture that will be used in Lyve Drive Rack.
The announcement was made on Thursday last week at the Seagate Datasphere. The company said that the CORTX software will give partners and developers access to mass capacity-optimized data storage architectures.
CORTX employs artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, machine learning, high-performance computing and the edge.
New players in object storage
In the past three weeks, two companies have joined the object storage market. They are Dell EMC with ObjectScale software. So, why do we need another object software storage tech?
According to Seagate’s GM for Enterprise Data Solutions, Ken Claffey, CORTX is offering a different product that is unlike other object stores. He said that it utilizes HDD innovations like REMAN to reduce the chance that rebuild storms may happen.
It also uses HAMR to allow the largest capacity for a low cost per bit and multi-actuators to retain IOPS per capacity ratios. He added that they are focusing on mass capacity deployments.
Seagate is on a roll
HAMR is the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording drive which will chip at 20TB capacity by the end of the year. It is the pathway to finally achieving 40TB HDD capabilities.
A Multi-Actuator drive has two sets of read-write heads. It also logically divides a disk drive into two halves that undertake read/write operations simultaneously.
This technology increases the bandwidth by a considerable margin.
So far, Toyota and Fujitsu have adopted CORTX. December will see the shipments of Lyve Drive Racks and the 20TB HAMR drives going out. The company is going to closely follow the open-source CORTX and its community.