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Although my friends at Kaminario came to talk about the new generation of its K2 storage systems, the hidden story is in the strength of its storage software. Kaminario's K2 has long been known for its hardware performance but now flash storage has reached a price point that companies can consider an all-flash storage environment.
K2 storage system
The fifth generation of Kaminario's K2 storage system builds upon the success of the previous products. Here are a few of the features of the newest member of the family.
- Reliability — Built-in redundancy, data replication, and application-aware snapshots and other features offer customers 99.99 percent uptime
- Scalability — The K2 supports both scale up, that is using larger and larger storage systems for growth, or scale out, that is deploying a large number of storage servers to address growing storage requirements. Customers aren't forced to choose a single approach to address their changing business requirements.
- Efficiency — K2's storage environment offers a number of capabilities designed to increase overall storage efficiency including global inline selective deduplication, inline compression, and thin provisioning.
- Compatibility — Kaminario's K2 is designed to easily integrate with the computing environments offered by Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware.
Snapshot analysis
While it is clear that Kaminario's engineers spent a great deal of time and energy thinking through how to best design their storage hardware, I believe the secret sauce is their software.
Here's how the company describes its SPEAR software environment:
K2’s Scalable Performance and Resilience Architecture (SPEART) is designed to harness the power of Flash with the right storage efficiency features such as global inline selective deduplication, inline compression, thin-provisioning, efficient and robust Kaminario RAID scheme and highly efficient metadata management. The outcome is the most cost-effective All-Flash Array (AFA), with better cost than HDD storage. However, there is no compromise on enterprise resiliency, which is gained via SPEAR’s native snapshot and replication features, high availability (HA) and non-disruptive upgrades (NDU).
In the end, it's Kaminario's innovative software that orchestrates the K2's hardware to create a reliable, cost-effective flash storage system. The software makes it possible to selectively deduplicate storage and not waste system resources looking for duplicated data in areas in which finding duplicated data is unlikely. SPEAR also allows the K2 to select the best block sizes to work effectively with many different types of storage media.
Kaminario's technology makes it possible for customers to start small and grow in ways that best fit their business requirements.
I've watched this company for years and have always been impressed by its approach to addressing customer needs. Is it now time for your company to consider flash as its primary storage tool?