Seagate Technology today announced a new object-based storage hard disk drive — the Seagate Kinetic HDD — that gives each hard drive its own IP address.

The new drives eliminate the need for storage servers, allowing storage applications to talk directly to tens, hundreds or thousands hard drives over Ethernet, something Seagate said can increase performance.

“We’re taking the management servers … out of the stack. Now the storage application goes to the IP address of the individual drive,” said David Burks, a director of product marketing at Seagate. “Instead of associating a bucket of storage with one IP address and using a storage server to retrieve information for you, you’ll have more IP addresses in your storage system and each one will represent [a] spindle or hard drive.”

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