Posts Tagged ‘Solid State Storage’
Posted April 17th, 2013
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Delivering on Our Vision for Enterprise Storage
By Dani Golan
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Today is an important day, not just for Kaminario but, we believe, for the entire enterprise storage industry. Today is the day we announce the Kaminario fourth-generation K2 all-flash storage array. What is so important about our fourth-generation product? Here are a few key points:
Breakthrough TCO: With K2 v4 we have been able to increase the density by more than 500% while cutting the price in half. Why is this so significant? Lowering the cost of enterprise-ready solid-state flash storage has been one of the long-time goals of the industry. If you believe, as we do, that solid-state is the future of Tier One storage, then it must be cost-efficient for all applications, not just those requiring the highest levels of performance. And now it is. What’s more, Kaminario’s TCO breakthrough extends the viability of solid-state to a new class of mid-size customers who can now afford unprecedented levels of performance, resiliency and ease of use from their storage infrastructures.
Killer Performance: Even before today’s announcement Kaminario delivered by far the best performance in the industry, with world record SPC-1 results for sustained performance and price/performance. With K2 v4 we now have 400% more read/write bandwidth than our previous versions, with consistently low latency (120-microsecond writes). Topping it off, we still offer industry-leading IOPS performance. K2 v4 delivers significant across-the-board performance advantages over any other solution for any combination of workloads, be they OLTP, OLAP or virtualization. It’s a level of performance consistency that is unparalleled in the industry.
Bulletproof Resiliency: Our proven SPEAR Scale-Out Architecture maintains data integrity through any type of failure. For most workloads the performance levels of our solutions will be minimally impacted—usually less than 10%. We even guarantee that degradation will max out at 25%. What’s more, our snapshots are the most efficient in the storage industry, enabling instant restore and recovery from any snapshot with no impact on the performance of the production environment. Snaps can be taken in just milliseconds, 20 times faster than any legacy SAN system on the market today. We make snapshots sexy.
These are major advances in solid-state that have been more than five years in the making. They move storage technology to a whole new level. Don’t just take our word for it: Take a look at the new architectural white paper or better yet, the independent report.
On a personal note, it is an important day for me, as well as for the entire team here at Kaminario. From the beginning we envisioned a new era in enterprise storage driven by solid-state flash and a true scale-out architecture. As of today, that vision is a reality. What’s next? We can’t wait to tell you…
Tags:application performance, Database Performance, Flash, Flash SSD, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, latency, OLAP, OLTP, reads, Solid State Storage, SSD, Storage Performance, virtualization, writes
Posted in All Flash Storage Array | No Comments »
Posted February 26th, 2013
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Measure Performance Over Time and with Three Dimensions
ANALYST SURVEY LOOKS AT REAL-WORLD IOPS REQUIREMENTS
By Kaminario
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Tom Coughlin and Jim Handy, respected storage analysts, conducted a survey on how many IOPS are really needed for several popular enterprise applications to better understand real-world IOPS requirements. They asked respondents about their critical storage applications and how many IOPS those applications needed. More than 80 percent of their initial respondents said that their key app was a database, an OLTP solution or a Cloud storage service. About half of the respondents said their IOPS needs were in the 1k to 100k range. Coughlin and Handy note that other factors like latency contribute to overall performance, not just speed. You can view research details from a presentation that Tom did at the SNIA Storage Developer conference, How Many IOPS is Enough? or get the full report at How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?
Measure Consistent Performance
I am bringing this up now as a way to comment on how Kaminario looks at performance. We do not see performance as a point in time such as timing a runner in a single forty-yard dash. True performance is measured by consistency of speed and results over time and as capacity and applications are added. You shouldn’t necessarily buy an all-Flash array based of the performance of a single app because there are so many variables that can come into play down the road. This is one of the reasons that Kaminario is taking the general purpose storage approach with the K2. We think it is smarter to evaluate a Flash storage system in the context of your entire storage environment and future app needs. You don’t want to buy a system that gives you great value up front but falls short in mixed workload environments. You don’t want to have to buy a separate storage system when you introduce a new application or need to drastically scale up capacity.
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, Flash SSD, high availability, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, latency, RDBMS Performance, Solid State Storage, Storage Performance
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted December 19th, 2012
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2012 Year in Review: SSD Grows Up
By Dani Golan
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2012 was the year SSD started moving from niche status into the enterprise mainstream, building up the seasoning and enterprise-class features it needs to take off in the years ahead. It’s obvious that enterprise IT is taking notice, feeling more comfortable with the technology, and becoming more aware of its benefits and best uses.
Here are some of the trend highlights we noticed over the past year.
Sales continued to grow – SSD sales continue their upward trajectory. According to IDC, the market for enterprise SSDs will continue to grow to $5.5 billion in 2015. SSD shipments in general reached 12.9 million units in the first half of 2012 and are expected to reach 28 million in the second half, according to HIS iSuppli Memory and Storage Service.
SSD continues to close the price gap with HDD – Flash pricing continues to become more competitive with hard disk storage, and the gap is narrowing. SSD prices continued to fall this year, with the bare media cost falling well below $3 per gigabyte in 2012, compared with almost $9 per gigabyte in 2010. Adding to the lower cost are the cooling and real estate advantages of an SSD array compared with hard disk storage.
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Tags:Anobit, data protection, EMC, Flash SSD, flash storage, FlashSoft, high availability, hybrid storage, IBM, IDC, Kaminario, NetApp, SanDisk, solid state devices, Solid State Storage, SSD architectures, SSD Solutions, Storage Performance, Texas Memory Systems, XtremIO Apple
Posted in SSD Solutions | No Comments »
Posted December 5th, 2012
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What Kind of SSD Solution is Best for your Needs?
STORAGE SWITZERLAND POST SUGGESTS QUESTIONS TO ASK
By Kaminario
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Judging from industry chatter and published articles, it is clear that the debate about all SSD versus a hybrid SSD/HDD array is picking up. Our blog touched on this a little bit recently. This strikes me as a good thing. While we believe the industry is on a journey to the time when HDDs will be used like tape is today, naturally there are waypoints. People need to balance their storage needs and budget with all available options to them.
This brings me to an article I recently saw from Storage Switzerland titled Flash SSD May be the Answer, but It Raises Many Questions. It highlights some of the questions storage managers should start asking their vendors about SSD storage to arrive at the best type of SSD solution for their needs.
The story suggests questions about sharing capabilities, high availability and a few other topics that organizations should ask vendors. When we speak with customers, we try to ask questions of our own. So here are three questions we always ask customers considering a hybrid or all-SSD solution:
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DataProtect, Flash SSD, I/O Performance, I/O wait, IOPS, Kaminario K2, latency, MLC, OLTP, RDBMS Performance, Solid State Storage, Storage Efficiency, Storage Performance
Posted in SSD Solutions | No Comments »
Posted September 4th, 2012
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Kaminario K2 Gains VMware Ready Certification
KAMINARIO K2 SOLID-STATE SAN READY FOR VMWARE ESXi ENVIRONMENTS
By Kaminario
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, Flash, Flash SSD, I/O bottlenecks, K2, Kaminario, Solid State Storage, solid-state SAN storage, SSD, Storage Performance, virtualized envionments, VMware ESXi, VMware Ready
Posted in Virtualization | No Comments »
Posted May 29th, 2012
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PedMed Express Recovers from Sluggish Database and Application Performance
SHOWS A 400% IMPROVEMENT IN DATABASE REPORTING AND WAREHOUSE OPERATIONS
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Don’t worry… we don’t plan to tell this story using a lot of cute medical or pet metaphors (aside from the title and sub-title of this article). The PedMed Express case study is a serious example of a business that was faced with database and application issues, which were leading them toward every IT manager’s nightmare…replacing their existing storage infrastructure. With I/O bottlenecks slowing down its daily reporting and warehouse operations, PedMed Express was on the verge of making the costly decision to replace its storage infrastructure with a higher performance solution, but was cautious about the issues around SSD reliability.
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Tags:Database Performance, I/O bottlenecks, K2, Kaminario, PedMed Express, PetMeds, Solid State Storage, solid-state SAN storage, SSD, Storage Performance
Posted in SSD Case Studies | No Comments »
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
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
Posted November 22nd, 2011
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Up the Solid State Revolution
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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There is a lot of truth to Chris Mellor’s Register article post Flashing upstarts tempt tech titans’ throbbing disks. Without the baggage of a huge installed base of HDD customers, ‘upstart’ flash storage suppliers can be pretty nimble at creating a new market based on the latest, high performance solid-state storage and also be pretty innovative and creative about their offerings too. The ‘gold’ that Chris refers to is not just in centering storage solutions on flash SSD, but in maximizing the potential that solid-state media brings to the market. Kaminario and others are staging a storage revolution when you consider that they are going up against such a huge establishment of mainstream storage providers, challenging them where they live…right in the HDD.
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Tags:Dell, Flash memory, Flash SSD, HDD, HDS, high performance storage, Kaminario, Solid State Storage, SSD
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
Posted November 10th, 2011
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Storage Column Highlights I/O Performance Issues
TANEJA: HIGH TIME WE SOLVED THE I/O PROBLEM
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Storage Magazine published a column recently by Arun Taneja, founder of the respected industry analyst firm Taneja Group, titled I/O performance in need of a fix.
The story discusses the I/O performance challenges that rapid data growth, advances in server technologies and compute-intense applications like ERP and transactional databases are causing in traditional storage. Taneja points out that solid-state technology is seen as the answer, yet controllers in traditional storage arrays aren’t designed to handle speedy SSDs.
We agree. Putting SSDs in traditional storage is like putting a jet engine in an automobile. You may have the power of a jet, but you’re only going to be able to go as fast as the rest of the car’s infrastructure will allow. Everything else is wasted and possibly destructive. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:Database Performance, DRAM, ERP, Flash, I/O, latency, Microsoft, Oracle, SAN, SAP, Search Storage, Solid State Storage, SSD, Taneja Group, TechTarget
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted September 26th, 2011
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db file scattered read
By Eyal Markovich
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In a previous post, “db file sequential read” wait event, I have explained the db file sequential read wait which is the most common wait event in Oracle that is associated with I/O Wait). In this post I will describe the second most common event that I see when system suffer from I/O waits: db file scattered read. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:Database Performance, db file sequential read, db fle scattered read, DBMS performance, high performance storage, I/O bottleneck, I/O wait, SANs, Solid State Storage
Posted in Oracle Database Performance | 1 Comment »
