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Seagate links hands with German BOSS, stomps its BigFoot

Put your hands together for the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform

Seagate has joined forces with a German storage firm to produce the BigFoot Object Storage Solution, aimed at scale-out cloud customers.

BOSS, produced jointly by Seagate and Rausch Netzwerktechnik GmbH, uses Seagate's Kinetic drives. The two say BigFoot "offers data centres increased packing density - providing more storage in less space."

The 4U chassis includes 288TB capacity from 72 x 4TB disk drives, meaning 2.8PB per rack. Each disk drive has 2 x 1GbitE interfaces and the Seagate positioning statement for these Kinetic drives is that they enable the elimination of the tier of physical storage servers and protocol conversions needed in the traditional server-to-storage array stack.

There's background on the Kinetic drive technology and its object storage access here and here.

Rausch is pitching this at scale-out cloud storage customers. Its MD, Sebastian Noelting, said: "The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform has enabled us to increase storage density and reduce performance bottlenecks. It allows us to better address the needs of our scale-out cloud storage customers and offer them improved capacity and scalability, while drastically reducing overall costs."

If this drastic overall cost reduction is true then use of the technology should spread fast as potential customers will see the benefit of producing or obtaining the drive interface software. Seagate says there is "a set of developer tools that helps simplify storage architectures by enabling applications to communicate directly with the storage device."

Is it worth customers or Seagate channel partners developing this interface software themselves rather than relying on traditional storage arrays or object storage products? We don't yet know how BOSS performance and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) compares to a traditional storage array alternative.

The Rausch web page about BigFoot is here. On that site we see there are three systems:

  • BigFoot XXLarge - 192TB
  • BigFoot XXL Short - 192TB
  • BigFoot JBOD - 288TB

None of these have Kinetic drives mentioned in their component overviews, so this CeBit system is a new BigFoot config. BOSS can be seen at CeBit 2014 in Hall 15, booth 21 at Hannover, Germany. ®

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