Object Drives

SNIA enables the adoption of Object Drives by creating consensus specifications, standardizing the points of physical and logical interoperability, facilitating drive manufacturers to second source each other (which in turn reduces the risk for client adoption), and providing education materials.

SNIA’s Object Drive technical work group produces a comprehensive set of specifications related to data and control path interfaces and protocols. These specifications are vendor agnostic and support future functionality in drive form factors. By developing and delivering SNIA architectures, specifications, and other standards for disk, solid state and tape drive based functionalities, SNIA enables higher level storage nodes in emerging scale out solutions, and promotes interoperability among Object Drive In-Storage Compute environments. This group also provides educational materials that will identify ways Object Drives can reduce complexity, conserve resources, and simplify the storage stack.

SNIA is defining two major types of object drives:

• Key Value Protocol (Object Drive) - Minimal incremental CPU/Memory requirements and simple mapping to underlying storage
• In-Storage Compute (Object Drive) - Enough CPU/Memory for Object Node Software to be embedded on the drive, general purpose download or factory installed and may have additional requirements such as solid state media and more/higher bandwidth networking connections

Cooperative efforts with other industry organizations such as the Linux Foundation Kinetic Open Storage Project and the DMTF Scalable Platform Management Forum’s RedFish Management specification, to help advance the adoption of Object Drives.

Join the SNIA Object Drive TWG to actively participate and help define Object Drives in a way that achieves interoperability in the industry. For more information about how to join, please send an email to objecttwg-chair@snia.org

Specification
The new IP-Based Drive Management Specification v1.0 is now a SNIA Technical Position. To download the specification, please click here:
IP-Based Drive Management Specification v1.0

Example Mockup Bundles

For developers implementing the IP-base Drive Manangement standard the following are available:

Simple IP Based Drive Mockup-4

IP Based Drive Array Mockup-2

Resources:

On-Demand Webcast: IP-Based Object Drives Now Have a Management Standard. Download a PDF of the webcast slides here.
Tutorials/Presentations:
Object Drives: A New Architectural Partitioning http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/fms2015

Press Release:
SNIA’s Object Drive Technical Work Group Receives the Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology Award at 2019 Flash Memory Summit

Article: 
Object Drives for the Enterprise - Object Drive in Enterprise Storage