The SSD Guy has just posted a new white paper to the Objective Analysis home page. It’s about Kaminario‘s approach to solid state storage.
Yes, this is a commissioned white paper, but that doesn’t preclude my taking the same unbiased approach my clients have come to expect. Kaminario has re-thought how SSDs should be used in storage, and that deserves some attention.
It’s only six pages, but even so I will condense the content for this post: Flash is tricky and a lot of high availability environments still avoid using it. Furthermore, HDD-based systems that are updated through the simple addition of SSDs don’t tap into SSD performance as well as they should, and they may even do things that cause the SSDs to wear faster than they need to.
Since Kaminario is a start-up and has no need to support legacy hardware or software, the company is free to take a different approach. The designers, veterans of companies like EMC, look at flash as something new to be applied differently than they would HDDs. They apply solid state storage in a way that makes it fast, reliable, scalable, and more cost effective than it would be if SSDs were simply added to a legacy HDD-based design.
Take a look at the white paper. It’s right up front on the Objective Analysis home page.
It looks to The SSD Guy that Kaminario has done something smart to take solid state storage in a new direction.
