Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc, a leading storage technology producer and innovator, and its Storage Products Business Unit are announcing a new key value technology for scale-out object storage, virtualization, big data analytics and active archiving. Via this new technology, Toshiba storage products customers can attain the benefits of both large capacity and high-performance scale-out object storage, while maximizing uptime and minimizing overall mean time to repair (MTTR).



Toshiba’s KV (key value) Drive (mock up shown above), is a multi-device storage solution that combines a large capacity HDD, a solid-state drive (SSD) for low latency, gigabit Ethernet, a 64-bit compute IC, and an open-source Linux platform that runs next-generation software in a single 3.5” form factor. This new technology is geared towards helping enterprise customers meet their ever-growing storage requirements by providing a feature-rich scale-out object storage solution that provide reductions in both capital expenditures and operating expenditures, yet still providing performance typical of HDD-based primary storage.



Scale-out object storage deployments continue to increase in the enterprise arena, and these key value technologies are capable of mainstream performance, as well as business applications requiring large capacities. By utilizing scale-out storage software such as Ceph, Toshiba’s KV Drives are a good fit for enterprise primary storage, information governance, unstructured data, data analytics, active archiving and cold storage. Toshiba’s key value drive technologies offer a blended platform that provides enterprise customers a single class of product to purchase, and this product can be provisioned differently for various workloads, resulting in a truly software-defined storage infrastructure.



According to Tar Thirumalai, director of market development for Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit, “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. 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.”

Image courtesy of slideshare.net

Also being announced is an Ethernet-based HDD-only version, which is geared toward, and optimized for, the emerging shingled magnetic recording (SMR) media interface. This large capacity key value solution is geared toward, and optimized for, active archiving and cold storage usage scenarios.



Sage Well, leader of the Ceph project, and manager of software engineering and consulting engineering at Red Hat, states that “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 translate into a technology that can make its way into users’ hands.”



Toshiba will be demoing the multi-device key value Ethernet drive technology at OpenStack Summit 2015, from 5/18 through 5/22 in Vancouver. They can be found at booth P1. You can view the Toshiba press release announcing the new key value drive technology in its entirety here.