Posted February 15th, 2012
In his January 18 Information Week storage blog, Biggest Storage Trend of 2012, George Crump predicts that storage performance management will likely be the biggest concern of IT in 2012. Performance management includes directing applications to the right storage infrastructure, monitoring storage performance in real time, and making quick adjustments when necessary to ensure your mission critical business processes run smoothly and quickly.
The increasing importance of performance management comes not only from the proliferation of speed- and latency-sensitive business processes and database applications, but from the fast rise of SSD that can actually provide that performance at a reasonable price. Crump points to the need for tools that provide quick, valuable, real-time insight to ensure that performance requirements are met consistently with the best bang for the buck.
The recognition of that need is behind the streamlined and information-rich architecture and interface of Kaminario’s management and performance analysis software for the K2 product line.
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Tags: George Crump, Information Week, IOPS, Kaminario, latency, mission critical, Oracle, performance analysis, performance management, read, SQL Server, SSD, Storage Performance, throughput, write
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Posted February 13th, 2012
Chin-Fah Heoh, author of the Storage Gaga blog (he is gaga about storage, not related to Lady Gaga), asked questions about Kaminario in a post last week. I’d like to thank him for writing. At Kaminario, we’re gaga about storage too, and we appreciate the opportunity to share a bit more about ourselves.
Some history Around the time that Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, Kaminario co-founders Dani Golan and Ofir Dubovi saw the explosion of Flash use in consumer devices. They envisioned that someday this technology would be used in corporate data centers. The challenge, as they saw it, was that the then current storage architecture was designed for spinning disks not solid-state media.
This realization led them to form Kaminario and create an infrastructure optimized for SSDs. Kaminario’s name is derived from the Japanese word Kaminari, which means thunder.
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Tags: application performance, Chin-Fah Heoh, Database Performance, DRAM, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, Kaminario K2, Storage Gaga, Storage Performance
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Posted February 9th, 2012
Scan all the news and blogs about EMC’s Project Lightning and Thunder announcements this week and you certainly get a lot of sturm und drang. Bloggers are shouting everything from EMC announcing another “me too technology” to the entry of a major market disrupter that will put a lot of cool SSD startups like Kaminario out of business.
I’m sure you expect me to say there isn’t much to this announcement, but, frankly, we’re talking about EMC so I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t matter. As Steve Duplessie says in The Bigger Truth, “EMC could put a wad of gum in a box and sell $300M worth.” Before you decide that Lightning and Thunder represent the perfect storm that will overwhelm all those other SSD solutions out there, here are a few things to keep in mind:
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Tags: application awareness, cache, DRAM, EMC, FAST, Flash, FusionIO, hard disk, HDD, K2, Kaminario, Project Lightning, Project Thunder, reads, SSD, Steve Duplessie, Storage Soup, Storage tiering, The Bigger Truth, The Storage Architect, VFCache, Wikibon, write-through cache, writes
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Posted February 5th, 2012
Duncan McCallum, Velobit CEO, responded to my post about shared versus direct attached storage and referred readers to one of their guides on the same subject. Clarity about the strengths of both approaches is useful and merits even more discussion to help organizations make the best choices for their budget and application requirements.
The truth is that we actually agree on many points. We agree that you can enhance the capabilities of a server-side SSD solution with additional software and hardware. That can get you performance and other benefits but it also adds complexity and potentially more points of failure especially when you add more servers into the mix. You still have to maintain and tune your existing array to work well with your server. Plus, growing your solution by adding servers also means more software and more complexity. All of these extras add capital and operational costs — and still may not have all the high availability (HA) features that an array may have such as RAID. Don’t forget that HA affects costs. When you lose an SSD in your server, you have downtime. A Kaminario K2 requires minimal operating cost – the same as a server solution.
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Tags: application performance, CRM, e-commerce, ERP, Flash, Flash SSD, high availability, Kaminario, OLTP, Online Transaction Processing, RDBMS Performance, server-side SSD, shared storage
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Posted February 2nd, 2012
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Goodbye Spinning Disks
MAKE WAY FOR THE TOTAL SSD DATA CENTER
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In two blog entries on storagesearch.com, Zsolt Kerekes delivers an interesting take on the future domination of SSD in the data center. In SSDs Replacing HDDs? That’s Not Exactly the Way it Happened, Zsolt predicts a time just five or six years from now when hard disks will simply be unacceptable in the data center, even if they’re given away free. In This Way to the Petabyte SSD, he goes into more detail, laying out how he expects SSD to eliminate hard drives from their last data center bastion: bulk storage.
The key driver for bulk SSD, according to Zerekes, will be the increasing value of archived data, which companies will harness to provide profitable customer data services. In such an environment, offline storage will no longer be an option. Instead there will be a need for massive amounts of very high-density, high-performance near-line storage. Data center space and operating budget limitations will mandate the most compact, power-efficient storage solution possible. Hence SSD. Kerekes predicts that bulk SSD storage will have the ability to keep most of its memory blocks in a powered-off sleep mode until they’re required. Bulk SSD won’t be the fastest SSD available, but it will be many times faster than disk, and will virtually pay for itself in power cost savings, reduced data center real estate, and longer life and reliability than hard disks.
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Tags: analytics, archived data, backup, bulk storage, business intelligence, CRM, data center, HDD, K2, Kaminario, Kerekes, machine logs, memory blocks, near line storage, offline storage, OLTP, petabyte, sleep mode, social network, SSD, storagesearch.com, Zsolt
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Posted February 1st, 2012
Customers frequently ask us about the benefits of the Kaminario K2 compared to those of adding a PCIe Flash memory card to application or database servers. We help them understand when a shared solid-state SAN storage solution such as the Kaminario K2 is going to shine for them and what application scenarios may be a fit for a Flash card. Typically, price and performance are top concerns, but customers also care a lot about data protection, scalability and ease of use.
Not surprisingly, your best SSD solution is driven primarily by your applications. We ask customers to consider:
- How important is speed? Do microseconds matter?
- If the application goes down or data gets lost, what are the risks to the brand and revenue?
- How important is a clustered environment?
- How will user and capacity requirements change over time?
- Is the application a strategic part of the business, or is it a one-off project or niche application?
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Tags: application performance, Database Performance, DRAM, Flash, Flash memory, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, PCIe, PCIe cards, RDBMS Performance
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Posted January 27th, 2012
In three new videos posted on the company’s website, Kaminario storage experts CEO and cofounder Dani Golan, VP of Engineering Shachar Fienblit, and Senior Solutions Consultant Kevin Colton explain the structure, development, and implementation of the Kaminario K2’s all solid-state SAN storage.
According to Dani Golan, solid-state drive (SSD) adoption has been held back by antiquated architectures created for slower and in some cases obsolete storage technologies. He believes that to unlock the blistering speed of SSD, “you need a dramatically different architecture.” “Kaminario’s unique and multifaceted Scale-out Storage Performance Architecture™, known as SPEAR, is based on four elements,” explains Golan. “A modular, scale-out design; best-of-breed open components; freedom of choice of the right solid-state media (Flash or DRAM) for specific applications; and the highest availability.” This approach and design plant the Kaminario flag at the forefront of the SSD market and, according to Golan, “Allow us to lead the revolution for all solid-state SAN storage.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: application performance, Dani Golan, Database Performance, DRAM, Flash memory, Fusion-io, I/O bottlenecks, K2, Kaminario, SDD, Shachar Fienblit, solid-state, Storage Performance
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Posted January 25th, 2012
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Notes from the Trenches
ENTERPRISE IT IS DOING ITS HOMEWORK ON SSD.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Kevin Colton, one of our solutions consultants, speak with some of our new hires about Kaminario’s market, its customers, and customer concerns and pain points. It was interesting hear a bit of what’s actually happening out there in the trenches, so I thought I’d share some of it with our readers.
According to Kevin, the tone of the market has shifted noticeably in the past 18 months. Before that time, Kevin was spending a lot of time with potential customers to demonstrate how the K2 could solve their I/O latency and performance issues. The interest was there, but there was also hesitance, as most IT departments were still “doing their homework” on SSD solutions and concerned about reliability, wear leveling, and other similar issues.
In the past several months, the high performance storage market has started to flip. Having finished their homework, enterprise customers are now approaching Kaminario in increasing numbers. Price is still a concern, particularly with DRAM SSD solutions, but falling prices, a better awareness of where SSDs make economic sense, and the SSD freedom of choice the Kaminario K2 all solid-state (Flash and DRAM) SAN storage provides have alleviated those concerns.
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Tags: analytics, batch processing, business intelligence, clustering, controllers, CRM, data warehouse, DRAM, electric utilities, email marketing, ERP, financial firms, heatthcare, hybrid, I/O, I/O Performance, insurance companies, K2, Kaminario, latency, manageability, metadata, N+1, reliability, research database, risk analysis, SAN storage, Scalability, service providers, SSD, telecommunications, university, usability, wear leveling
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Posted January 23rd, 2012
Take the first step in the solid-state disk revolution and join us for an informational webinar. Find out about the new all solid-state SAN storage from Kaminario and the next generation storage architecture called SPEAR. Learn how you can turbo-charge your applications and significantly improve database performance.
Dates: January 25, February 8 or February 22
Time: All webinars take place at 1:00pm EST
Speaker: Kevin Colton, Kaminario Solution Consultant
Kevin is a storage industry expert and works with Fortune 500 enterprises to help them solve their application and database performance problems.
Click here to register for any of the upcoming Join the Flash SSD Revolution Webinars.
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Posted January 23rd, 2012
Yesterday, Search Storage and Storage Magazine announced finalists in six categories for its 2011 Products of the Year awards. We’re very excited that Kaminario was named a finalist in the storage systems category for its K2 Flash and DRAM all solid-state SAN storage.
Two things stand out when you peruse the finalist list. First, eight of the 11 finalists had some mention of SSDs in their descriptions. That shows the momentum SSDs are gaining in the market. Secondly, it is clear that the big storage players do not have a monopoly on innovation. The list includes several emerging companies doing great things, like Kaminario, to help customers enjoy the benefits of SSDs.
We continue to believe that 2012 will be the Year of the SSD. Congrats and good luck to all the finalists. We are happy to be among them.
Tags: application performance, Awards, Database Performance, DRAM, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, Kaminario K2, Product of the Year, Searchstorage, TechTarget
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