Kaminario – The SSD Guy Blog

Kaminario Adopts Software-Only Business Model

Kaminario recently decided to adopt a “software-centric” business model, rather than sell all-flash arrays as the company has done since its inception. The company says that this will allow it “to streamline operations, while focusing its resources on continued software innovation,” acknowledging that the change: “represents a strategic business model shift for Kaminario.”

Hardware support for existing and future Kaminario customers will be provided by Tech Data, which Kaminario’s release tells us is the world-leading end-to-end distributor of technology products, services, and solutions.

Jay Kramer of Network Storage Advisors, a friend of The SSD Guy recently provided me with some valuable insights on Kaminario’s restructuring and has allowed me to share them here. Jay is a recognized technology consultant specializing in the network storage industry.

Here’s what Jay has to say Continue reading “Kaminario Adopts Software-Only Business Model”

Kaminario Seizes SPC1 Title Again

For the second year in a row little Kaminario has beat the large established storage array vendors to produce the highest SPC1 benchmark rating at 1.24 million SPC-1 IOPS.

The results of the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 report, show Kaminario surpassing last year’s record performance by 20k IOPS.

Interestingly enough Kaminario set the 2012 record using DRAM while this year the company was able to do it with its fourth-generation all-flash K2.

Why is the SPC1 test so highly respected in Continue reading “Kaminario Seizes SPC1 Title Again”

Kaminario’s Performance and 7-Year Flash Life Warranties

Today Kaminario added a performance guarantee and a 7-year warranty to its arsenal. The company introduced its “Consistency Under Failure Guarantee” which ensures customers will see no more than a 25% drop in performance during a system failure. This means that critical operations and applications can continue to run at near-standard performance despite the failure of an SSD or even an entire node. Kaminario president Dani Golan told The SSD Guy last week that this is a conservative guarantee, and that few customers see more than a 10% degradation during failure tests in their own production systems.

As for the 7-year flash endurance warranty, no matter which SSD Continue reading “Kaminario’s Performance and 7-Year Flash Life Warranties”

Kaminario Goes All-Flash

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 Continue reading “Kaminario Goes All-Flash”

New White Paper: Enterprise Reliability, Solid State Speed

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 Continue reading “New White Paper: Enterprise Reliability, Solid State Speed”

SSD Presence Growing at Oracle OpenWorld

At Oracle’s October OpenWorld conference in San Francisco more exhibit hall space was dedicated to SSDs this year than ever before. That’s because Oracle runs faster on systems with SSDs than on systems without.

Even Oracle ships SSDs in its popular Exadata system, and the company recently announced that it had shipped over 1,000 installations since its introduction in 2009. Continue reading “SSD Presence Growing at Oracle OpenWorld”