Toshiba Entering Into Ethernet HDD/SSD for Object Storage

Toshiba Electronics Europe announces two new key value-based technologies for scale-out object storage, big data analytics, virtualization, and active archival.

With these technologies, Toshiba customers can reap the benefits of large capacity and high performance scale-out object storage while maximizing uptime and reducing the overall mean time to repair (MTTR).
 
The first key value technology is a multi-device storage solution that integrates Ethernet, SSD for low latency, large capacity HDD for higher throughput, 64-bit compute, and an open source Linux platform for running next generation software-defined storage applications – all housed in an industry standard 3.5-inch form factor.

This new technology is intended to help enterprises meet their growing storage needs. The technology enables a rich set of scale-out object storage features [delivered in combination with scale-out object storage software on the Toshiba Key Value-drive] that deliver on both capital expenditures and operating expense reductions, while providing performance on a par with HDD-based primary storage.
 
The second key value-based technology solution is an Ethernet based HDD-only version primarily optimized for the emerging shingled magnetic recording (SMR) media interface. This large capacity key value technology is optimized for archival and cold storage applications.
 
As scale-out object storage deployments in enterprises increase, key value technologies have the potential to be part of mainstream performance as well as capacity-oriented business applications. Enabled with scale-out storage software such as Ceph, Toshiba’s high performance and capacity-optimised key value-based object storage drives are well suited for enterprise primary storage, unstructured data, information governance, analytical data, and for archival and cold storage.

Toshiba key value technologies provide a homogenous building block that allows enterprise customers to buy a single class of product that can be provisioned for disparate and demanding workloads, delivering a true software-defined storage infrastructure.
 
“These new technologies demonstrate Toshiba’s commitment and leadership in emerging key value-based object storage drive markets. By approaching this market holistically with two different technologies, Toshiba is addressing both the high performance workloads and large capacity workloads,” said Martin Larsson, VP of Toshiba Electronics Europe, storage products division. “As the storage industry evolves beyond storage management to data management, it is important to expand our storage solutions offering to include key value object-based data access methods.”
 
“When we were first designing Ceph ten years ago, the key idea was that a loosely-coordinated collection of smart devices may scale and perform better than a traditional array of disks. It is exciting to see that vision shared by leading component manufacturers like Toshiba and translated into a technology that can make its way into users’ hands,” said Sage Weil, leader of the Ceph project and manager of software engineering and consulting engineer, Red Hat, Inc.
 
“As the leading developer of object based file systems, Exablox is excited to see this next generation of key value store technology from Toshiba. We feel that Toshiba’s approach will enable new classes of revolutionary storage solutions for customers of all types,” said Douglas Brockett, CEO, Exablox Corp.
 
The multi-device key value Ethernet drive technology demo was showcased during OpenStack Summit 2015 held in Vancouver, Canada, May 18-22, 2015.