Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’

Posted April 17th, 2013
Dani Golan

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…

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Posted February 23rd, 2012
Gareth Taube

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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Posted January 9th, 2012
Dani Golan

Get Ready to Kick Some Flash

2012 PROMISES TO BE THE YEAR OF SSD ENTERPRISE STORAGE

By Dani Golan
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In January, the San Diego Supercomputer Center will debut Flash Gordon, the first flash memory-based supercomputer. It features 300 TB of flash that can perform 36 million IOPS. This achievement is a fitting way to kick off 2012, which will be the Year of SSD storage in the enterprise. While no one is declaring HDD dead, the transition to SSD storage has begun in earnest — especially in high-end enterprise storage. In fact, it is easy to see that over the next decade, SSDs will become the dominant storage media in the data center. Let’s take a look at some of the trends that are making this happen.

2012 TRENDS/FORCES HELPING DRIVE SSD ADOPTION

Enterprise revenues from SSDs will continue to grow
Organizations vote with their dollars. According to research firm IDC, revenue from SSD sales to enterprises in Q3 was$522 million, more than twice the dollar figure over the same period in 2010. There is no reason why that trend won’t continue, especially as vendors do a better job explaining SSD costs versus HDD costs.

Recently, Mark Bramfitt from storage analyst firm Wikibon stated:

“Solid-state storage is poised to enter mainstream use in data centers in the near term, driven by large potential performance advantages and supported by dropping cost premiums compared to disk-based systems.”

Media and online attention about SSDs is also increasing. A Google search for “SSD flash” yielded 14.6 million results during 2010. Searching the same phrase in 2011 gave you 112 million results. Trade publications such as Storage Magazine and INFOSTOR are putting SSD adoption among their 2012 storage trends. INFOSTOR’s Drew Robb wrote that SSDs continue “to represent one of the hottest areas of innovation in data storage.”

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Posted July 6th, 2011
Gareth Taube

Dell Rounds Out Storage Offering with K2

DELL BECOMES A FORCE TO CONTEND WITH IN STORAGE

By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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DELL BECOMES A FORCE TO CONTEND WITH IN STORAGEIn a June 17 mass email entitled Dell Storage Forum Wrap, George Crump presents his perspective on Dell’s evolving storage strategy. With its recent acquisitions, including SAN storage system vendors Equallogic and Compellent, NAS software technology from Exanet, and data deduplication vendor Ocarina, Dell is crafting a product offering that will make it a force to contend with in the storage market.

From George’s point of view, Dell is looking to push Compellent, with its innovative virtualization, management, and data movement technologies, upstream into the enterprise, while increasing Equallogic’s share of the mid-range market and holding its own PowerVault storage line for direct attached storage. It’s making a play for the cloud with its DX object storage and using Exanet’s NAS technology to push into the unified storage market, where Exanet recently appeared as a front end for Dell’s Equallogic line and will soon do the same for Compellent. Dell also looks to be moving its acquired Ocarina data deduplication technology throughout its product line, so that data can be moved and stored compactly across Dell storage products and technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

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