You won't hear us complain about the term "open source," particularly when it's used to further storage innovation. This week, Seagate has announced the expansion of the open source program associated with its Seagate Kinectic Open Storage platform to include API and libraries. It's an enterprise announcement, enabling those firms to leverage a new programming interface and integrate it into cloud software stacks, additional devices, and new systems.

Mark Re, Seagate’s chief technology officer, had this to say about the reveal: "Seagate is committed to the Kinetic platform and we see enormous potential in opening it up to developers around the world to provide them with the ability to deliver breakthrough cloud storage architectures. We believe in driving open source innovation and empowering a vibrant ecosystem of system builders and software developers with the tools they need to deploy cutting-edge storage solutions and drive this truly revolutionary platform."


Seagate's opening up the platform's API, libraries, and simulator technologies in order to enable the OpenStack community to design, test, and deliver applications and system designs built upon Seagate Kinetic technology. The release of the API and associated libraries will expose source code for various software development languages enabling storage software to talk directly to a Kinetic drive. The Kinetic Open Storage API encourages both software and hardware suppliers to get involved and integrate Kinetic commands into their solutions. The libraries being released today include support for the C++, Java, and Python languages. The open source libraries also encourages developers to leverage the protocol directly and write their own libraries if desired.

The news is being announced at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta this week, where we expect plenty more enterprise-related news to flow from.