Cisco, Dell, Seagate and others launch Kinetic Open Storage Project

The Linux Foundation has announced a new collaborative project – called the Kinetic Open Storage Project. The project aims to promote open source software and standards for cloud object storage technologies.

The Kinetic Open Storage Project has got backing from Cisco, Cleversafe, Dell, Digital Sense, Huawei, NetApp, Open vStorage, Red Hat, Scality, Seagate, SwiftStack, Toshiba and Western Digital.

The Kinetic Open Storage platform has gained broad interest from both hardware and software players in the storage industry and is seen as a foundational technology for providing open source object storage on next generation, Ethernet-enabled storage devices.

“Storage technologies are becoming increasingly complex as the cloud, virtualisation and container technologies converge. Open source software and standards can speed the evolution of storage technology to support these areas,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “The Kinetic Open Storage Project will allow industry leaders to address new challenges head on and support rapid growth through a community-developed protocol specification and libraries.”

The Kinetic Open Storage Project provides both Ethernet connectivity and a key/value store that allows storage applications to access drives directly without the need to be managed by a storage server.

The new project will manage the open source libraries, APIs and simulators interfacing with Kinetic-based drives. OEMs will now have a choice of drive vendors for Kinetic-based drives. In addition, developers of storage solutions can utilise vendor-agnostic open source libraries and APIs to create new applications leveraging the power of Kinetic-based drives.