Every flash array vendor out there yammers on about high performance, including us. That’s what we’ve come to expect from flash arrays. SSD flash is quickly becoming mainstream technology at the enterprise level because of its performance and affordability.

The reality is, it’s not all about high performance in I/O. Enterprise storage requires the ability to support a mixture of workloads, with consistent, predictable IOPS, bandwidth and latency.

Let’s look at some real world examples:

• Any Business: It’s the end of the fiscal year. The sales team is hammering their CRM trying to close business and finance is running a massive number of queries to get reporting ready for end of quarter. Which business unit could afford to lose performance? How about… Neither.

• Retail: Sales order entry transactions are constantly competing with accounts receivables and payables entries for performance. Do you want to get paid, or do you want more sales? That’s an easy one! Both.

• Manufacturing: Assembly line transactions are constantly competing with accounts receivables and payables. Slowing down an assembly line can cost millions of dollars, and often times, lost opportunities. Not really an option, right?

The choices are loss of productivity, which ultimately results in loss of profits in the immediate term, and future growth, a.k.a. losing your edge in the marketplace. Neither of these sound good to us, and definitely don’t sound good when considering the impact on your business.

This is why the Taneja Report results were so exciting for us. The testing group showed that doubling the number of K-Blocks doubles I/O and bandwidth performance while keeping latency consistently low (see the below table for specific results). There were no IOPS that impacted overhead in scaling the Kaminario K2 with a read-heavy workload.

The Taneja Report also tested latency during snapshots, showing that latency stayed consistent and predictable when snapshots were executed, with a near zero impact on executing I/O. Plus, the snapshot was completed in less than one second. Multiple loads were running at the same time, yet the impact on latency was also negligible. Even in the event of a hardware failure, performance remains consistent and predictable.

I urge you to consider consistency in performance across workloads as a top tier requirement when looking at storage performance. Considering what you have to lose, consistency really is a no-brainer at this point.

To check out the report, click here.

It is no secret that scalability has long been the elephant in the room for most solid-state storage vendors. The fact that most solid-state vendors can’t scale creates multiple storage silos driving up operational overhead and costs. Scalability and predictive performance are essential to maintaining mission critical storage access, yet few have been able to architect their way to an effective solution. We keep hearing rumblings from the big guys about their scale-out solutions, but no GA yet. Meanwhile, Kaminario has been providing customers with true scale-out architecture since 2010. The fact is Kaminario is the only enterprise scale-out all-flash array vendor on the market today.

In the newly released independent report by Jeff Boles, senior analyst with the Taneja Group, “Kaminario K2: The Truly Enterprise-Ready SSD Storage Array,” the firm evaluated Kaminario’s newest scale-out all-flash storage array (K2), testing performance, scalability, storage capabilities and resiliency in databases and virtualized environments.

The report validated Kaminario’s scale-out architecture and its ability to deliver customers with consistent, unsurpassed performance in any mixed workload. The tests also confirmed K2’s ability to provide ready-for-enterprise features on top of the most sophisticated resiliency approaches on the market. As noted, “…better than linear progression of performance in terms of both IOPS and bandwidth, with 1ms or less of latency”, and following a node failure concluded that, “Kaminario K2 effectively maintains mission critical storage access, making disk, node or subsystem failures inconsequential.”

So how did the Taneja Group think Kaminario faired against everyone else clamoring for a seat at storage performance table? Pretty well it would seem, as the firm cited Kaminario as “a force to be reckoned with” amongst its competitors.

We’ve worked incredibly hard to make K2 the best product on the market today. We knew we created something to be proud of, and are extremely pleased to see that the Taneja Group agrees. We urge you to judge for yourself. To request a copy of the report, click here.

Our team is ecstatic about the results! We hope you will be, too.