Posted March 21st, 2012
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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
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Posted March 12th, 2012
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RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE IN THE REGISTER
By Didi Atzmony, Director, Kaminario
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Chris Mellor’s article about the TMS RamSan-820 made some comparisons between the Texas Memory Systems product and the Kaminario K2.
I just wanted to take it a step further by emphasizing two differences between Kaminario and TMS that enterprise customers should consider: non-disruptive operations and linear scalability.
Though the TMS RamSan-820 appliance as a unit has fully redundant hardware components, it lacks one important feature – hot replacements. When a failure happens (as it always does), the entire system becomes a single point of failure, exposing operations to data unavailability or worse data loss. Failed components have to be replaced ASAP.
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Tags: application performance, data protection, Database Performance, DRAM Storage, Flash, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, Kaminario, TMS
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Posted March 8th, 2012
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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
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Posted March 5th, 2012
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By Eyal Markovich
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In the series of Oracle storage wait events I have covered so far, five different events are related to the storage: “db File Sequential Read”, “db File Scattered Read” wait events, “Direct Path Read”, “Direct Path Read/Write temp” and “Free Buffer Wait”. In this post, I will describe the log file sync wait event, which in many cases is caused by poor storage performance. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: application performance, Database Performance, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash SSD, K2, Kaminario, latency, log file sync, OLTP, Oracle databases, RAID, RDBMS Performance, solid-state SAN storage, SSD appliances, Storage appliances
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Posted February 29th, 2012
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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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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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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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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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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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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
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
