Kaminario today announced independent audit results of the K2’s price performance conducted by the Storage Performance Council. In summary, we blew the doors off the SPC-1 Results, breaking the SPC-1 performance record as the first certified results exceeding one million IOPS, while also cutting the cost-per SPC-1 IOP by more than half. These results are the best in the history of the SPC-1. In addition, the K2 sustained its IOPS levels in a 24-hour SPC-1 test run.

Sources:
Kaminario K2: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00118
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 6.2 with IBM Storwize® V7000 Disk Storage: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00113
HP P10000 3PAR V800 Storage System: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00109
Texas Memory Systems RamSan-630: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00105

Validation for SPEAR —As I see it, this is a big validation for our Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR). SPEAR distinguishes us from others in the industry with its unique ability to orchestrate mixed workloads over a distributed cluster of solid-state storage — all within an environment that supports advanced data protection features. Plus, as a software innovation, SPEAR offers substantial flexibility to adapt to evolving needs. All this leads to better application performance typically between 200 and 2,000 percent.

A testament to the robustness of the SPEAR design is that it sustained the 1.2M SPC-1 IOPS performance over 24 hours, maintaining performance well beyond the 8-hour period achieved by previous SPC competitive tests. This proves that the SPEAR design is a stable and consistent architecture, something that many of our customers who run continuous analytical processing applications can appreciate.

What It Means —High-end solid-state SAN storage performance is getting increasingly affordable. Clearly, solid-state price/performance ratios are getting better and better over similar HDD ratios. Kaminario’s SPC-1 results are not necessarily a total tipping point for SSD, but when you more than double the performance record and cut the cost-per-IOP record by more than half to $0.40 per SPC-1 IOP, it is a significant milestone.

Read the full SPC-1 report at: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1/#a00118

Kaminario’s continued focus on improving performance at lower cost within a full data protection environment is aimed at mainstream database and OLTP applications in the enterprise data center. Growing application sizes and complexity means that high-performance storage requirements are no longer for niche applications only.

Last January, we proclaimed 2012 the Year of the SSD. Given our outstanding, unsurpassed SPC-1 Result, I can’t help but think that the remainder of this year and all of next year will be even bigger for solid-state storage.