Open Kinetic is an open source Collaborative Project formed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation dedicated to creating an open standard around Ethernet-enabled, key/value Kinetic devices.
Kinetic is a drive architecture in which the drive is a key/value server with Ethernet connectivity. The architecture is inspired by the scale out data center in which Ethernet and Linux are ubiquitous, open source software reduces barriers to entry, and hardware is becoming more commoditized.
The result is a drive that supports the basic put, get and delete semantics of object storage with additional features for data integrity, security, drive and cluster management, and software defined storage that can access Kinetic drives directly.
Over the past decade, the explosive growth of large-scale, data-driven applications has fundamentally shifted the nature of enterprise storage infrastructure. The traditional paradigm of hardware-centric, file-based systems is moving aside to make way for new software-defined, object-based approaches.
In this world, objects (information) are written, read, deleted, but never modified. Unstructured data has been growing significantly over traditional business data for a few years now and this gap will widen significantly in the next few years. New types of solutions are required to address these challenges that are cost optimized both for capacity and for performance. Tiering and distribution have become imperative. Analytics has become both routine and essential – on demand, in real-time, across any dimension and any ‘heat’ of data. In addition, Ethernet, the undisputed fabric of data centers and application traffic, has now also emerged as the backbone of storage infrastructure.
The combination of these factors mandates a redefinition of storage devices, interfaces, and full stack architectures. In order for the industry to achieve the growth demanded to support these storage demands, we must strip out layers of inefficiency from legacy architectures, and to introduce a new approach optimized for scale-out application and data center needs.
The Open Kinetic Project was formed to help drive this transformation this. By creating an open source standard for accessing Kinetic drives, it expands the available ecosystem of developers, both software, hardware, and systems.