Seagate CEO Stephen J. Luczo and his wife Agatha

The networking piece of the software-defined data center puzzle is falling into place as the vendor ecosystem re-imagines the way transport capacity is managed and distributed throughout the enterprise stack. Seagate Technology PLC is bringing the revolution to the storage layer with a new series of disk drives that can communicate with applications without going through an intermediary.

Narrowing the gap between storage and compute

The Western Digital Corp. rival promises to eliminate the need for storage servers with its newly operationalized Kinetic technology, which attaches an IP address to each disk that makes it possible for applications to access capacity directly over Ethernet. No storage servers means fewer hardware purchases, more power and space for other equipment and lower headcount requirements, which Seagate claims can together add up to total savings of as much as 50 percent.

But that’s just the beginning. Besides cutting costs, the hard drive maker highlights that the new four-terabyte Kinetic HDD making adding extra capacity to an environment as easy as just putting in more drives, eliminating a key barrier to scalability. That makes the technology well-suited for analytics use cases that involve ingesting continuously growing amounts of information, most notably Hadoop.

This focus on large-scale data crunching also carries over to the software side, with the drives employing an object-based architecture to expose data, which is ideal for the kind of unstructured workloads that the batch processing platform is designed to handle. That approach also cuts out many of the traditional software and networking components in legacy storage stacks, simplifying application development while significantly improving response times.

Bringing the network into the fold

Even as Seagate rethinks connectivity to remove storage as a bottleneck to modern workloads, a new startup called Akanda Inc. has turned networking from a means into its end, hoping to bring the same benefits the disk maker promises with Kinetic to the transport layer. The two-man team exited stealth on the same morning as the new hardware made its debut with $1.5 million in seed funding from Dream Host.

Akanda traces its roots back to 2011, when the hosting provider started working on an OpenStack service specifically geared towards developers that eventually became available to the public last week under the name DreamCompute. The project originally incorporated networking visualization from Nicira Inc., now a part of VMware Inc., but DreamHost soon decided to replace it with a homegrown alternative it would later release under a free license – presumably to cement the platform’s open-source status, a core selling point. And so Akanda was born.

Building on the existing switching capabilities in the upstream OpenStack ecosystem, the technology provides an added layer of control one level up the networking stack in the routing plane that provides features such as the ability to isolate traffic to a virtual machine from the rest of the environment. Akanda said that it will use the funding to promote the development of its namesake software, provide integration with other projects and drive the adoption of its commercial orchestration overlay.

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