Bringing down the cost of storage is a big focus now as files continue to grow in size and retention becomes more popular with even casual users.  Services like Amazon and Netflix require huge amounts of storage to keep their products on and every penny they can squeeze results in better profits for themselves and shareholders.  Seagate is addressing this with their new Kinect, a type of HDD which connects directly over Ethernet without needing server infrastructure to work.  There is a working demonstration of this technology using Bigfoot JBOD at OpenStack and AOL is at least somewhat interested in testing arrays of these drives.  The Register offers a bit more information here, hopefully more will be forthcoming after the OpenStack conference wraps up.

"Kinetic is a disk drive directly addressed over Ethernet using Get and Put-style object storage commands using an open source API. The idea is that applications can directly use banks of these drives without having to go through complex filesystem software stacks or block access protocols and storage array controllers."

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