Author Archive
Posted May 7th, 2012
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Array Rumble at Storage Tech Field Day
SSD ARRAY VENDORS FACE OFF OVER SOLID-STATE STORAGE ARCHITECTURES
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Another interesting seminar at Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day, hosted by Nigel Poulton, addressed the best architecture for an SSD array. Participants included Thomas Isakovich, CEO and Founder of Nimbus Data Systems, Umesh Maheswhari, CTO and founder of Nimble Storage, Jonathan Goldick, software CTO at Violin Memory, and Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire. It was a pretty lively debate, with Goldick grinning broadly through much of it and taking jabs at the others. One couldn’t help but wonder what he was grinning about.
The truth is, there was a lot of disagreement over the best array architecture and sometimes the argument got a tad heated and personal, much to the delight of the audience. However, there were three things everyone could agree to. First, the best architecture is one that provides an ideal balance of scalability, share ability, reliability, and performance, not performance alone. Second, for all but the few most performance- and latency-sensitive applications, it’s more important to provide consistent, predictable performance for an array of applications, than to provide the absolute best performance. And third, the best architecture is a mix of commodity hardware and a software architecture designed from the ground up for SSD. Sound familiar? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:architecture, cache, Dave Wright, deduplication, disk, Flash, hybrid, Jonathan Goldick, Kaminario, latency, Nigel Poulton, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data Systems, off-the-shelf hardware, scale-out architecture, SolidFire, SSD, SSD array, Stephen Foskett, Tech Field Day, Thomas Esakovich, tiering, Umesh Maheshwari, Violin Memory Systems
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Posted May 2nd, 2012
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Kaminario’s Dani Golan Speaks at Tech Field Day
SOLID-STATE STORAGE IS THE NEXT BIG IT REVOLUTION
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Last week, Kaminario CEO Dani Golan presented at Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day in San Jose. The event afforded us the opportunity to have conversations with several data storage bloggers including Howard Marks, Nigel Poulton, Chris Evans, Ray Lucchesi, Robin Harris and Hans DeLeenheer to name a few.
I was fortunate to be in the room, and the feedback I heard is gratifying. In fact, DeLeenheer published his thoughts about Kaminario in his blog and said we were worth watching.
In addition to providing a K2 product overview, Golan shared insights about the SSD market and where Kaminario fits. “Solid-state storage is the biggest storage revolution in the last 30 years…one of the biggest in IT since virtualization.”
One of the effects of this revolution is that definitions for high end, mid range and low end are being turned on their head. Improving price/performance and increasing application requirements make it tough to distinguish among tier 0, tier 1, tier 2 etc. I would argue “that our software stack is far superior to a $3 million high-end [HDD] array,” Golan said.
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Tags:Database Performance, Disk latency, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, Foskett, IOPS, Kaminario, Tech Field Day
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Posted April 30th, 2012
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Welcome to the Party, EMC
EMC’S LIKELY ACQUISITION OF XTREMEIO VALIDATES SSD AS A TIER 1 STORAGE SOLUTION
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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The press has picked up on indications that EMC is about to acquire future SSD array vendor XtremeIO. This is an interesting development coming on the heels of EMC’s Project Lightning and Thunder announcements. As everyone knows, EMC is the mother of all disk storage vendors and has, until now, touted SSD primarily as a cache solution fronting and accelerating scores of legacy EMC disk storage arrays. Project Lightning and Thunder reflect this strategy, with Lightning providing a server based PCI SSD read cache solution and Project Thunder looking to do the same thing with a storage array.
XtremeIO is in prerelease semi-secretive mode right now, but has said clearly that it aims to produce pure SSD arrays to compete with the likes of Kaminario, Violin Memory, and all the other usual SSD array suspects. An EMC acquisition of such a vendor indicates that holes have developed in EMC’s SSD cache armor and the disk storage giant feels forced to validate SSD arrays as a large, viable, growing market competing with disk. It will be interesting to see how EMC integrates XtremeIO’s technology into its strategy without eating into its bread and butter disk array product line.
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Tags:cache, data protection, DataProtect, DRAM, EMC, enterprise storage, Flash, high availability, K2, Kaminario, mainstream storage, PCI, performance, Project Lightning, Project Thunder, Pure Storage, RAID 10HD, read cache, Scalability, SSD, SSD array, storage arrays, tier 0, Tier 1, Violin Memory, XtremiIO
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Posted April 23rd, 2012
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Built for Speed and Endurance
FLASH WEAR IS AN ISSUE THAT IS FADING FAST
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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You’ve probably heard about the endurance limitations of Flash–particularly MLC–and the hoops manufacturers jump through to lengthen life expectancy. If you really want to understand what this issue is all about and how SSD vendors handle it, check out Eric Slack’s Storage Switzerland post entitled Why Flash Wears Out and How to Make it Last Longer.
Slack provides a very thorough explanation of how and why NAND Flash degrades, why MLC degrades faster than SLC, what actually happens during that degrading process, and all the tricks SSD manufacturers employ to slow it down. Techniques include sophisticated error correction, spare blocks of NAND flash that take over when one block degrades, and wear leveling, which distributes write operations across available blocks to ensure that a single block doesn’t wear out prematurely. Vendors also embed advanced technologies, such as digital signal processing, in their SSD controllers to reduce bit errors and reduce the workload on the error correcting (ECC) engine, and employ sophisticated read level adjustments to recognize data on a degraded Flash block. Some SSD controllers can also make sophisticated adjustments to the way a cell is read and written to minimize wear.
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Tags:digital signal processing, DRAM, DSP, ECC, Eric Slack, error correction, Flash, Flash endurance, Fusion-io, K2, Kaminario, MLC, NAND, PCIe, RAID, RAID 10HD, SLC, SSD, SSD controller, Storage Switzerland, TCO, wear leveling
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Posted April 8th, 2012
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Murphy’s Law and Home-Grown SSD HA
BAKED IN BEATS WRAP AROUND
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In his recent StorageSearch blog, High Availability Enterprise SSD’s, Zsolt Kerekes discusses why building a do-it-yourself HA solution typical of data center Fibre Channel or IP SAN hard disk array installations is not a viable option for an enterprise SSD array. The reasons, according to Zsolt, boil down to performance, flexibility of use, risk, complexity, and scalability. I would add Murphy’s Law.
Zsolt points out that any home-grown HA solution sitting in front of an SSD storage controller is likely to introduce considerable latency and time to the recovery process. When it comes to the mission critical applications typically running on SSD arrays, such as online transaction processing, time really is money and simply not something you want to sacrifice. “Wrap around” HA, as Zsolt calls it, also introduces architectural complexity and controller configuration issues that can gum up the works.
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Tags:cluster, data center, data corruption, DataProtect, enterprise SSD array, Fibre Channel, high availability, IP SAN, K2, Kaminario, latency, Murphy's Law, N+1, Online Transaction Processing, outage, SSD, Storage, storage node, StorageSearch, Zsolt Kerekes
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Posted April 3rd, 2012
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SSD: The Server Terminator
SSD ELIMINATES MORE THAN I/0 BOTTLENECKS
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Most of you know that SSD is a great way to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, but did you know that it can also eliminate servers in the data center–with all the requisite hardware, power, cooling, and real estate savings?
In SSDs and Server Consolidation, Jim Handy of Objective Analysis demonstrates how the use of SSD eliminates the need for server-hungry I/O acceleration techniques, such as running the Open Source caching program memcached on its own server or sharding, which splits large databases into smaller parallel data sets running on multiple servers.
Add SSD, either as local or shared storage–including the Kaminario K2 mentioned in Jim’s blog (Thanks Jim)–and you can get the same or better performance results without all that unsightly excess server hardware. And you get less complexity and better reliability to boot. I’ll be back.
Tags:caching, cooling, databases, hardware, I/O bottlenecks, Jim Handy, K2, Kaminario, memcache, Objective Analysis, Open Source, power, server, sharding, SSD
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Posted April 2nd, 2012
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Reflections on a Launch
A MONTH HAS PASSED SINCE KAMINARIO INTRODUCED DATAPROTECT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Analyst and Media Reaction to the DataProtect Launch
It has been just over a month since Kaminario launched the DataProtect™ high availability and data protection capabilities for the Kaminario K2 product line. Analyst and media reaction has been very positive — highlighting the advantages and challenges that we have ahead.
After reviewing the DataProtect coverage, three messages stood out:
- High availability and data protection features such as DataProtect are needed for SSDs to be accepted as a HDD replacement in the data center;
- Kaminario is moving beyond the high-performance storage niche segment and aiming squarely at primary storage;
- DataProtect gives Kaminario some advantages but market competition is very aggressive.
Just to recap the coverage highlights, I’d like to share a selection of comments that capture much of the feedback we have observed.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:application performance, data protection, DataProtect, Disk latency, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, High Availablity, IOPS, K2, Kaminario
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Posted March 21st, 2012
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Keep those SSD’s Coming!
NEW PRODUCTS ARE HITTING THE MARKET DAILY
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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The SSD market has been bubbling up since the beginning of the year with a lot of new players, products, and technologies flowing into the market like a mighty stream. It’s exciting and interesting to see how many companies are getting into the act and the different market categories beginning to take shape.
Let’s start with server-side SSD cache solutions, given that storage giant EMC has made a big splash there with its Project Lightning VFCache product. Server-side cache-supposedly saves the customer some money and protects an existing disk storage investment—which is probably why EMC is all hot over it. The theory is that by using SSD as a cache for the most heavily accessed data, you get a good balance between cost and performance. You also get to take advantage of fast PCI performance. But unlike a pure PCI SSD solution, a server-side SSD cache can pull data from the entire storage environment, rather than just a single server. The positives make sense, but the drawback is that most of these solutions are read-only caches, so you do nothing for fast writes, and they add more complexity to your storage environment than an all-SSD solution. In this category, new solutions from OCZ, and Fusion-io have also shipped recently.
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Tags:cache software, data compression, data deduplication, DataProtect, DRAM, EMC, EMLC, Flash, FlashSoft, Fusion-io, Greenbytes, HP, hybrid, IBM, K2-H, Kaminario, Nexsan, OCZ, PCI, Project Lightning, Pure Storage, RamSan, replication, SanDisk, SAS, serial ATA, snapshot, SSD, SSD cache, Texas Memory Systems, unified storage, VeloBit, VFCache, XIV Gen 3
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Posted March 8th, 2012
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Array Vendors: Get out of SSD’s Way
ARRAY VENDORS THAT USE DISK-FORM-FACTOR SSD’S JUST DON’T GET IT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In his blog entry entitled Are SSD-based arrays a bad idea? Robin Harris argues that packing arrays full of disk-form-factor SSD’s is counterproductive. Why? He cites several reasons, including latency, bandwidth, reliability, and cost, but mostly it boils down to squeezing a fast storage media into a slow architecture—much like driving a race car through rush hour traffic or putting wings on a bicycle. Cost and reliability come into play as well, because shoving flash into a disk form factor is less space efficient, less reliable, and more expensive than mounting it on a board.
Enterprise SSD is a young, rapidly evolving market and will continue to evolve until the industry agrees on the perfect SSD architecture and creates standards around it. Expect that to take several years. In the meantime we at Kaminario believe we have come pretty close. We agree with Harris that board-mounted flash makes a lot of sense for reasons of cost, performance, and reliability. That’s why we pack the K2 full of board-mounted PCI flash cards and DRAM. We also hold down cost with our N+1 HA architecture, RAID 10HD data protection (See What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data Protection and Why Kaminario’s DataProtect is a Big Deal), and the use of industry standard components, the PCIe bus, and market leading Fusion-io technology.
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Tags:bandwidth, data protection, disk form factor, DRAM, enterprise SSD, Flash, FusionIO, high availability, K2, Kaminario, latency, PCIe, RAID, reliability, Robin Harris, SPEAR, SSD, SSD array, Storage Mojo
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
