LinuxCon + ContainerCon North America 2016

This talk will outline use of Kinetic ethernet disk drive technology to build a petabyte-scale object storage system. The Kinetic Open Storage Project has incubated a set of hardware products and software interfaces to allow individual disk drives to be directly connected to general-purpose ethernet networking (instead of being hidden behind SAS/SATA or FC busses) and to be access via a key-value API (instead of traditional LBA access). The talk will overview experiences with a cluster of over 500 ethernet drives interconnected into a single cluster and operating as a single large-scale storage system. We will discuss the physical design, logical software structures, API benefits and limitations, manageability, and performance of this solution in comparison to traditional systems.