Seagate has delivered its promised Kinetic hard drive - a storage device that connects via Ethernet and talks objects, not sectors. Seagate says this approach could cut cloud storage costs by up to 50 percent, and promises the ecosystem will be open so other vendors can join in.

Kinetic was first mooted in 2013, and has now been demonstrated at the OpenStack Summit in Paris.

The idea is to put more intelligence on the drive itself, and abstract the sector-level information, so drives can evolve in their own way without having to impact on the rest of the system. This potentially eliminates a whole chunk of cloud hardware - the storage servers that are currently used to manage hard drives can be replaced by a simple Ethernet switch.

Cost reduction is just the start
Seagate starts its pitch with a promise of cutting storage costs in half - reducing total cost of ownership over four years with a combination of less hardware and lower power requirements for storage.

But the real change is beyond that, product line manager Ali Fenn told DCD. “Now storage systems don’t need any notion of blocks and sectors,” she said. This opens the way for innovations in the hard drive which would normally require software rewrites - changes such as altering sector sizes, or using novel recording techniques:”Shingles come for free,” she said.