Seagate CORTX - Intelligent Object Storage Software
Optimized for mass capacity and data-intensive workloads.

CORTX: Open Source Mass-Capacity Object Storage
Democratizing Access to Data via Mass-Capacity Data Platform Solutions

CORTX is an open-source softwaredefined object store backed by Seagate and designed, built, and maintained by a growing community of data scientists and big data and enterprise storage experts.

Designed by a consortium of highperformance computing (HPC) experts with an eye toward future data center requirements, CORTX enables maximum scalability, resiliency, and hardware efficiency. Without any concurrency-reducing global locks, CORTX provides immediate consistency for object access. For maximum scalability, concurrency, and searchability, CORTX distributes metadata management across all servers. To ensure data resilience for everlarger data sets, CORTX erasure coding can provide multi-tiered data protection across all known data center failure scenarios.

Uniquely, CORTX benefits from a tighter integration with storage. CORTX enables the data to communicate directly with the storage drives without an intervening file system. This direct-to-drive architectural feature improves performance and reliability while giving finer control over storage drives. Most importantly, this also allows us at Seagate the best possible vertically integrated design so that new capabilities introduced at the device level can be immediately leveraged by the object storage system without requiring us to wait for some thirdparty file system to add support for new device capabilities In addition, ongoing device innovations like HAMR and multi-actuator are being developed in parallel with CORTX to ensure that their capabilities and efficiencies are delivered to end users and applications with the quickest possible path to productization. Finally, CORTX has an integrated scale-out, autoindexed key-value store (KVS) to simultaneously enable scalable labeling and search of zettabytes of data. Just saving the at-risk data is not enough—we must simultaneously enable fast search across these massive data sets. CORTX has been designed for extremely optimized metadata search, as well.

The diagram below shows CORTX’s ntended role in data centers servicing a wide range of targeted segments via a host of frameworks and protocols. CORTX is uniquely optimized for mass-capacity hardware devices and supports bandwidth workloads, capacity workloads, and metadata search. It is an object storage platform specially designed to support the largest HDDs.

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Mass Capacity Object Storage, Open at Last

Cost shouldn’t be a barrier to storing more data. CORTX™ is 100% open source object storage that enables efficient capture and consolidation of massive, unstructured data sets for the lowest cost per petabyte. Designed, built, and maintained by Seagate and a community of data scientists and enterprise storage experts, CORTX brings exabyte scalability to your private cloud.

Features:

No More Software License Fees

Licensing often exceeds the acquisition cost of actual storage capacity.

Seagate is revolutionizing enterprise storage with Lyve Drive Rack, a tightly integrated, converged infrastructure solution that bundles up to 1.7PB with CORTX object storage—giving you the storage capacity you need, without the expensive storage software license fees.

• Bundles Seagate storage with CORTX 100% open source software, servers, and networking
• Enterprise-hardened, fully tested, and supported by Seagate
• Up to 1.7PB of raw capacity in a single converged infrastructure solution

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Exabyte Scalability

Hyperscale resilience, availability, and performance.

• No global locks for scalable performance in consistent object, key value, file and clusters
• Distributed metadata management: enabling maximum scalability and concurrency
• Scalable data experience—add structure to unstructured data and enable easy, fast access, search, and analysis
• Scalable health monitoring tracks performance metrics and identifies bottlenecks

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Open at Last

Solve tough data challenges with easy access to object storage.

100% open source reduces vendor lock-in, future-proofing data access and flexibility for your unique and dynamic requirements.

• Community-built and maintained on GitHub
• Cloud interoperability streamlines data movement between clouds and includes S3 compatibility for unstructured data
• Open architecture allows core functionality to be added modularly, while streamlining code and preventing bloat
• Vendor-agnostic management interface supports compatibility with SSPL and Redfish/Swordfish

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Superior Efficiency & Economics

CORTX unleashes the cost advantage of HDD in mass capacity architecture.

100% open source reduces vendor lock-in, future-proofing data access and flexibility for your unique and dynamic requirements.

• Innovation-ready design provides industry-leading cost per petabyte
• Take advantage of the latest HDD innovations in capacity, performance, density, and resilience, future-proofing your investment
• Ensure data resiliency for ever-larger data sets by offloading erasure coding to specialized, purpose-built ASIC for multitiered data protection
• Future-proof scalability and flexible extensions simplify setup, streamline code, and protect against bottlenecks

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CORTX Extensibility

The diagram below shows the high-level architecture and highlights the extensibility features of CORTX. Developers can easily add additional protocols and interfaces by writing modular interfaces to libMotr to complement the S3 Server and NFS Server interfaces. CORTX also provides a simple interface by which core modularity can be added into the data path. Using a low-level interface called File Data Manipulation Interface (FDMI), developers can add modules via a publish-subscribe mechanism to intercept and augment, or even transform, the CORTX data path. As is shown in this figure, FDMI can be used to add Information Lifecycle Management, security, tiering, and more.

About the CORTX Community

The CORTX Community strives to create the world’s best masscapacity scalable object storage system. To reach our goals, the community aims to embody four core principles:

Inclusive — Our ambitions are global. The CORTX community is too. The perspectives and skills necessary to achieve our goals are wide and varied; we believe in creating a community and a project that is inclusive, accessible, and welcoming to everyone.

Open — Seagate is dedicated to remaining open and transparent. Seagate believe in keeping CORTX Community code freely and fully available to be viewed, modified, and used without vendor lock-in or other in-built limitations.

Inspired — CORTX is all about the challenge. Our goals are not small: we want to build the world’s best scalable mass-capacity object storage system, one that can work with any hardware and interoperate with all workloads. CORTX is built on hard work, ingenuity, and an engineering mindset. Seagate embrace hard problems and find inspired solutions.

Evolving — CORTX is continuously growing and adapting. As a community project, there is no limit to its development. Seagate continuously make room for improvement and welcome the opportunities offered by the ever-evolving nature of community projects.

Documentation:

Download the Seagate CORTX - Intelligent Object Storage Software Solution Brief (.PDF)