On the practical side, this means that the drive is "connected" to one or more servers (and can be re-homed on the fly). The storage system itself is responsible for coordinating the communication across the cluster of Kinetic drives. In our case, the coordinating storage system is OpenStack Swift.
On the humorous side, this means that technobabble like "Can you ping the boot record?" or "What does a traceroute to the directory show?" actually sorta make sense now.
Does this not scream "bad idea" to anyone else?
Is the concern more from an ergonomic perspective, that someone in a data center may plug in a drive into the wrong system?
The main concern would be that, yes, someone could plug the drive into the wrong system.
Even though (for example) USB3 is blue connectors, it's interoperable if you plug USB2 gear in.
