SCIENCE

Kaminario announced its next generation K2 high performance, highly available and ultra-low latency storage solutions. Accommodating the high performance storage needs of diverse applications, workloads and budgets, the new Kaminario K2 family offers a choice of media (DRAM/Flash) in a single system without compromising on enterprise-class speed, self-healing high availability or ease of use. Kaminario will incorporate the Fusion-io ioMemory Flash technology into its K2 architecture, combining best-in-class solid-state technology with the industry's first enterprise-grade, all solid-state SAN storage solution. See press release: Kaminario and Fusion-io Collaborate to Deliver Enterprise-class, All Solid-State SAN Storage.

Customers can now start with the solid-state media that is right for them today and then add additional media types to the same system as their needs grow and change. To achieve this level of customer investment protection and flexibility, Kaminario is incorporating media freedom of choice into its innovative K2 architecture. The result is an all solid-state SAN storage system that delivers the fastest, most reliable and cost-effective application performance on the market today.

The new Kaminario K2 solutions maximize productivity by increasing the performance of high-I/O and latency sensitive applications at less than the cost of legacy SAN storage. The Kaminario K2 family of all solid-state storage includes:

Kaminario K2-H: A hybrid of DRAM and Flash solid-state media for optimizing mixed READ and WRITE workloads; DRAM for WRITE intensive, latency sensitive data, and Flash for READ intensive data. The K2-H accommodates a mix of application types or the different needs of individual files within a single application's multiple processes (database temp files, redo logs, etc.).

Kaminario K2-D: DRAM-only solid-state media for WRITE intensive and latency sensitive random workloads such as high-end OLTP and DBMS applications. The K2-D is specifically designed for those customers that require the ultimate in solid-state storage performance.

Kaminario K2-F: Flash-only solid-state media for predictable READ intensive workloads such as analytics, data warehousing and certain types of DBMS applications.

All K2 models come with standard self-healing high availability and can be installed and deployed within just a few hours. All models are available now and prices start at $30/GB.

"With the introduction of the new K2 family of all solid-state SAN storage, customers can now choose, in a single storage array, the best solution for their particular application workload and budgetary needs," said Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario. "The freedom to choose the media you need today and then change it tomorrow represents better investment protection than any other solid-state solution on the market."

Kaminario teams with Fusion-io on Flash technology

The Flash technology in the Kaminario K2 is supplied through collaboration with Fusion-io. Kaminario is incorporating the Fusion-io ioMemory Flash technology as part of its revolutionary Scale-out Storage Performance Architecture (SPEAR). Kaminario and Fusion-io will also team up to bring the Kaminario K2 family of products into joint customer environments."

"Kaminario's innovative, hybrid solid-state shared SAN storage provides a powerful enterprise platform for our ioMemory technology," said Jim Dawson, executive vice president worldwide sales, Fusion-io. "The resulting benefit to our joint customers is a very affordable storage solution that delivers outstanding application performance and self-healing high availability."

Customer reaction

Businesses gain greater productivity and customer satisfaction with faster, more responsive applications, as well as substantial cost benefits. The Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage solutions offer the lowest cost and a lower footprint than legacy SAN storage. In addition, every K2 all solid-state SAN storage system includes self-healing high availability so duplicate systems are not required for data reliability. For Kaminario's customers, the ROI of the Kaminario K2 cannot be duplicated by any other solution in the market today.

Kaminario customers have experienced remarkable results with the new K2 all solid-state SAN storage solutions. They are seeing greater performance on the K2 than on legacy storage systems (HDD and SSD) and are moving their mission critical enterprise data to the K2 to gain faster application response time, extremely low latency, higher reliability and more effective system utilization.

"Kaminario allowed us to scale out to the level of performance and redundancy that we needed to reduce report delivery times," said Gregory S. Thomas, Vice President of Information Technology, Managed Health Care Associates Inc. "The K2 enabled us to consolidate our database environment onto one fast, reliable and scalable storage system to meet the increasing demands from our users."

See press release: Managed Health Care Associates (MHA) Scales Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Performance with Kaminario All Solid-state SAN Storage.

Industry reaction

Industry analysts also see that all solid-state SAN storage is where the industry needs to go.

"Our validation testing has confirmed that Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage solutions are fast, safe and easy", said Brian Garrett, Vice President, ESG Lab, Enterprise Strategy Group. "Combining the cost effective speed of Flash and the blazingly fast performance of DRAM devices in a Fiber Channel attached storage solution with enterprise-class high availability, the K2 all solid-state SAN storage is ideally suited to meet the needs of performance-hungry business-critical database applications."

"Business critical applications have different performance requirements that present storage with varying types of workloads. The key is solving these needs without blowing the storage budget," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "With the new Kaminario K2 all Solid-state SAN storage, businesses, for the first time, gain the flexibility to choose the best solid-state media, be it DRAM or Flash, or a combination, for their application and business price/performance requirements within a single system."

"Kaminario is the first vendor that we know of that has Flash and DRAM in the same storage system for data delivery," said George Crump, Lead Analyst, Storage Switzerland. "Every organization is different and will need a different mix of DRAM to Flash. However, none of this performance matters without the ability to scale and do so in a simple and reliable fashion. Kaminario's SPEAR architecture provides a storage environment designed for zero latency, high performance storage with no downtime."