ENGINEERING

Kaminario announced the availability of a new white paper, "Enterprise Reliability, Solid-State Speed." Written by Jim Handy, an analyst with the market research firm Objective Analysis, the paper discusses how enterprises are increasingly turning to solid-state storage as their data volumes and performance needs intensify. However, placing solid-state drives (SSDs) in systems designed for hard disk drives (HDDs) prevents the user from achieving the high performance that SSDs can deliver.

Handy's paper explains another concern, which is protecting data and maintaining its reliability and high availability with high performance SSDs. Enterprises find they have to sacrifice high performance for data protection and availability, or vice versa, as many SSD solutions are not optimized for high performance, data protection and high availability. However, there are newer storage systems with architectures designed for SSDs and that use new topologies and software to "better harness SSDs' performance and reliability capabilities at a much more reasonable price."

Handy elaborates:

"The storage community is just beginning to be offered systems that have been designed to take advantage of all of Flash's speed. These systems perform significantly better than legacy HDD-based approaches that have been accelerated by replacing HDDs with Flash. Although the simple addition of SSDs requires a far smaller engineering effort, more SSDs will be required to net the same performance, and all in all, that makes the system more expensive."

Handy's conclusion presents the Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage system as an optimal solution:

"By teaming a smart, SSD-aware architecture with solid data protection, Kaminario has devised a very scalable, reliable and cost-effective system. Furthermore, the fact that HDD, Flash and DRAM can be mixed and matched to meet the system's needs gives the K2 great flexibility."

Kaminario recently announced DataProtect, its next generation of enterprise high availability and data protection for the K2 line of all solid-state (Flash and DRAM) SAN storage. With DataProtect, the Kaminario K2 features industry-leading, end-to-end, self-healing high availability and fast, high-volume data protection while delivering extreme performance.