Kaminario has introduced the 4th generation of its K2 enterprise-grade storage array. Unlike the company’s earlier K2s, which supported DRAM, SSD, and HDD, the fourth generation K2 is all-flash, based on SAS SSDs alone. The company says that its new approach reduces the cost of ownership by supporting a larger capacity within a smaller footprint while requiring less power and cooling.
The SSDs are MLC products, rather than the SLC ones used in earlier K2s, allowing Kaminario to reduce the cost. Although the SSDs Kaminario uses come with a 5-year warranty, the K2’s SPEAR operating system optimizes flash endurance allowing Kaminario to offer a 7-year warranty. (SPEAR is Kaminario’s scale-out performance storage architecture operating system software.)
The original K2 was built with a focus on high availability and data protection and this new version of the K2 expands upon that. Its self-healing features, automated data mirroring, and hot swappable components have been configured to minimize performance impact upon recovery from a failure. Space-efficient snapshots further assist in data recovery.
The new K2 has been optimized for mixed workloads and applications that can avail themselves of its consistently high read/write bandwidth and IOPS along with its low latency. It also adds the iSCSI interface to the K2 platform, which previously only communicated through a Fibre Channel interface.
Kaminario says that the new K2 is fast to install and can be brought into a production environment in less than a day. The system has been designed to support non-disruptive upgrades to minimize downtime and support costs.
What Kaminario is most proud of, though, is the product’s scalability. Although it has only qualified systems as large as 120TB, the company is confident that the system will successfully scale well beyond that level. The system has been designed to allow performance to linearly scale with all applications and, in particular, within virtual server and VDI environments.
