Archive for February, 2012
Posted February 29th, 2012
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What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data Protection
ALL HA SOLUTIONS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Folks from EMC and IBM started Kaminario because they felt passionately that any SSD device worth its name must have an architecture designed from the ground up for fast SSD, not a slow legacy disk architecture tweaked for SSD.
Enterprise mission critical applications need bulletproof reliability as well because any interruption or data loss, even for an hour, can squash not only productivity, but revenue. So Kaminario designed DataProtect’s high availability (HA) and data protection features from the ground up for fast SSD once again.
This is important to remember because many SSD solution vendors claim enterprise-class HA and data protection features, including all kinds of redundant components. But when they start with their HA and data protection checklist you should ask the following questions.
Is HA non-disruptive? Take a look at this Kaminario K2 High Availability Demonstration on the Kaminario Web site. What happens when someone pulls an entire storage node out of the K2? Well, not much and a whole lot. In a matter of seconds, SPEAR’s clustered N+1 architecture detects the outage, starts to fail over to a spare data node, reconfigures the array around the outage, and returns performance to its previous level, all with no data or access loss. Can those other SSD vendors do that? Keep in mind that in a dual-controller configuration typical of other SSD solutions, performance will suffer significantly when one controller drops out and will stay that way until it is replaced. Watch our demonstration video again. Do you want anything less for your revenue critical apps? All of the K2’s storage nodes are also hot swappable, so replacing a node will be non disruptive as well.
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Tags:DataProtect, disaster recovery, DR, enterprise, Flash, HA, high availability, K2, Kaminario, mission critical applications, N+1, RAID, RAID 10HD, RAID 4, RAID 5, reliability, replication, snapshot, SPEAR, SSD, SSD wear, storage node, write intensive
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Posted February 28th, 2012
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Enterprise Reliability, Solid-State Speed
OBJECTIVE ANALYSIS WHITE PAPER LOOKS AT HOW SSD SOLID-STATE STORAGE REQUIRES THE RIGHT ARCHITECTURE FOR BOTH PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY
By Kaminario
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In the world of solid-state disks, speed is a given. SSD vendors have thrown their efforts into blistering velocities of hundreds of thousands of IOPS, feeding performance and, in many cases, rendering legacy storage arrays obsolete. But with any new idea, issues arise with implementation and proliferation. Wholesale changes in the enterprise are often fraught with trepidation and risk, and this hesitation is holding back the full deployment and possibly the full potential of SSDs. Jim Handy of Objective Analysis recently published a whitepaper pointing out that “the most widely adopted approach to using them [is] putting SSDs into a system designed around HDDs [which] ends up crippling the SSD’s performance while cheating the user of much that the SSDs have to offer”.
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Tags:data protection, DataProtect, flash storage, high availability, Jim Handy, K2, Kaminario, Objective Analysis, SNIA, Solid State Storage, SSD, Storage Strategies NOW
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Posted February 26th, 2012
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Why Kaminario’s DataProtect is a Big Deal
TIME TO TALK MORE ABOUT MAINTAINING DATA RELIABILITY and SSD PEFRORMANCE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Kaminario today announced DataProtect™ which adds enterprise high-availability and data protection capabilities to our K2 line of all-solid-state SAN storage. The details are published on our Website including a highlight video, but I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts about why the news is significant.
An architecture purpose-built for SSDs From its earliest days, Kaminario has believed that to get the most from solid-state media, you need a storage architecture purpose-built for SSDs. This notion applies to data reliability capabilities such as high availability (HA) and data protection as well as performance. When your applications are screamingly fast, your HA and data protection operations, including snapshots and replication, need to be able to keep up. The ideal SSD architecture should also be fully automated and support non-disruptive operations, so when there is a failure, your data is safe and accessible.
Performance is not enough While many organizations purchase SSDs for performance, more and more are saying that performance is not enough. You’ve got to be fast, but you have to be safe. Speed is absolutely important, but there is no question customers are making data reliability capabilities a growing purchase-decision factor. Concurrently, innovation around data reliability is accelerating faster than innovation around SSD performance, in my opinion. It continues today with DataProtect. Kaminario is raising the data reliability bar within all solid-state storage and now offers customers the most comprehensive HA and data protection software stack available.
Today’s announcement is an indication as to what you will see from us moving forward. The intelligence built into SPEAR allows us to continue to expand HA and data protection benefits to make our storage fast, safe, easy, and cost effective. It may not happen this year or next, but eventually all solid-state media will be the standard for primary storage in enterprise data centers. So that is where our compass is pointed.
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DataProtect, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash SSD, I/O bottlenecks, K2, Kaminario, SSD, SSD appliances, Storage Performance
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Posted February 23rd, 2012
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Hey IBM Power System Users, You Have a Choice
THE K2 HAS FULL AIX SUPPORT AND A LOT OF ADVANTAGES COMPARED TO THE USUAL SUSPECTS.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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EMC made a big splash early this month with its Project Lightning announcement, but at just about the same time IBM made a quieter announcement, packing an SSD cache into its XIV storage system to help with demanding workloads such as analytics, cloud computing, and virtualization. In fact IBM made a point of claiming that TCO for the XIV generation 3 was 69 percent lower than with the equivalent EMC system.
It’s easy to get caught up in the clash of the titans, especially if you’re running databases on AIX-based IBM Power Systems, as the AIX storage options out there are limited. However, AIX users have a choice beyond the usual suspects: Kaminario’s K2 is one of the few pure SSD array solutions with full support for AIX. Here are some reasons you may want to consider the K2 for your I/O-intensive Power System workloads.
The K2 is a Pure SSD Solution – As with EMC’s Project Lightning, IBM’s XIV system uses SSD as a kind of cache band-aid for slow disk storage, moving data in and out of cache according to complex algorithms. The disadvantage: As with Project Lightning, the IBM cache is for reads only, so you won’t get the fast writes you get with the K2; you won’t get the performance until the right data is moved into the cache; you’re likely to get some cache misses; and all that cache data is duplicated on disk storage, which is not the most efficient solution.
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Tags:AIX, analytics, cache, cloud computing, database, David, disk controller, EMC, Goliath, I/O, IBM, IBM XIV, K2, K2 Hybrid, Kaminario, OLTP, performance bottleneck, Power Systems, Project Lightning, reads, SPEAR, SSD, SSD array, TCO, virtualization, write-intensive workloads, writes
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Posted February 15th, 2012
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Performance Management At a Glance
OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE WILL BE JOB ONE IN 2012
By Eyal Markovich
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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
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Thank You and Hello to Storage Gaga
RESPONDING TO A BLOGGER QUESTION
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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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
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Project Lightning: Perfect Storm or Sturm und Drang?
EMC’S ANNOUNCEMENT IS IMPORTANT, BUT NOT A GAME CHANGER.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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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
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When HA is Paramount, You Probably Want a Shared Storage Array
MY RESPONSE TO A COMMENT FROM A PREVIOUS POST
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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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
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Shared Solid-state Storage vs. Direct Attached Solid-state Storage: Which Is Right for You?
IT IS ALL ABOUT YOUR APPLICATIONS
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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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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