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Founded in 2008 and
headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with an Israel-based R&D division,
Kaminario boasts world class professionals, with an experienced management team.
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Combined, they pool their
knowledge and expertise in storage systems, networking, operating systems, BI
and data processing to provide cutting edge products and solutions. The company
serves customers in a wide range of diverse markets, including financial,
telecommunications, web service providers, and government bureaus and agencies.
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See also:-
Kaminario
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and
Kaminario's storage acceleration blog | |
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Who's
who in SSD? - by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - April 2013
Kaminario is a leading company in the
high availability
segment of the enterprise
SSD market, with rackmount
SSDs which operate in
FC and
iSCSI SAN environments.
Kaminario made its first appearance in the
Top SSD Companies List
in the 2nd quarter of
2012.
In the most recent quarter -
2013 Q1 -
Kaminario was ranked #19 overall and #9 in the list of top rackmount SSD
companies.
Kaminario's original systems were
RAM SSDs. In 2011 the
company inrtoduced flash into its product mix by using
PCIe SSDs sourced
from Fusion-io. By
February 2012 the company told me that nearly half its systems included flash.
Today - in the 2nd quarter of 2013 - like over 98% of the enterprise SSD market
- Kaminario is primarily a flash systems supplier.
In its most recent
products - the K2 v$ - launched in April 2013 - the company changed its internal
flash strategy to use SAS
SSDs.
Among the many competitors for Kaminario in the fast performance end of
the HA SSD market spectrum are:-
Violin,
IBM (based on the product
line acquired from Texas Memory Systems),
Nimbus Data Systems,
Huawei Symantec and
EMC.
Another
competing factor in this market has been the recent introduction of SAN-like
fabric capability and HA support for remote shared flash in
PCIe SSDs.
Although
it's unlikely that most traditional SAN installations will migrate their SSD
data to these shared server clustering architectures - the availability of these
new technologies means that new installations which need both high random IOPS
and HA have more design choices than they did before. |
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In June 2010 -
Kaminario launched its
1st product - an FC SAN connected acceleration appliance in which
a
grid of blade servers access upto terabytes of shared memory. Pricing starts
at $200,000.
In May 2011 -
Kaminario announced
it
had secured $15 million in Series C funding bringing its total investor
funding to $34 million.
In September 2011 -
Kaminario
announced
it has integrated Fusion-io's
PCIe SSDs as a new
option in its
K2
FC SAN compatible SSD
product line (which was hitherto
RAM SSD only) to
provide flash and
hybrid storage
options. Using the new options the K2 can provide from 3 to 30TB of non-stop,
protected and self healing, blade server based flash storage in 4U to 12U of
rack space with R/W latency of 260 / 150 microsends at a list price of $30K /
TB.
In June 2012 -
Kaminario
announced
it has secured a $25 million series D round of funding, bringing its total
funding to $65 million.
In April 2013 -
Kaminario launched
its 4th generation HA SSD system - the K2 v4 - using
SAS SSDs as the
internal flash components - with 120 / 280 microsends R/W latency, 369K IOPS and
6GB/s theroughput per K block. The capacity density is 6TB usable per U at a
cost of $10K to $15K per TB. |
| .. |
| 85% of
Kaminario's capacity today is flash |
Editor:- February 7, 2012 - Here's an update on
the long running RAM
versus flash transition in enterprise SSD accelerators.
It's about
20 months since Kaminario
entered the SSD market as a new name in the
RAM SSD market - and
just 6 months since the company also started offering flash - as a hybrid or
pure alternative - based on PCIe SSDs from Fusion-io.
Yesterday
I asked Kaminario's VP of marketing - Gareth Taube
how's the flash thing going? And can you tell me and my readers what
proportion of recent system shipments are flash rather than RAM. |
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He told me - "I would
say we are running about 45% all flash arrays, 45% Hybrids (but the hybrids are
mostly Flash with 10% DRAM) and about 10% all DRAM. At least that is the way it
has been running in the last 2 quarters." | | | |
| . |
| finally
SANward bound... Fusion-io inside Kaminario's K2 |
Editor:- September 13, 2011 -
Kaminario
announced
it has integrated Fusion-io's
PCIe SSDs as a new
option in its
K2
FC SAN compatible SSD
product line (which was until now
RAM SSD only) to
provide flash and
hybrid storage
options.
Using the new options the K2 can provide from 3 to 30TB of
non-stop, protected and self healing, blade server based flash storage in 4U
to 12U of rack space with R/W latency of 260 / 150 microseconds at a list price
of $30K / TB.
Editor's comments:- Kaminario was already
thinking about how to do a flash option when I spoke to them in March - but at
that time they hadn't made a definite decision about how they were going to
proceed. I've said to several RAM SSD makers in the past year or so - that
working with Fusion-io can make business sense - because when a user has an
installed base of flash acclerated servers that opens up opportunities for
upstream SAN SSDs.
Anyway Kaminario's VP of marketing - Gareth Taube -
told me yesterday he remembered that earlier conversation and said it was
funny how when they were going around visiting potential customers for their RAM
based K2 - how many times the sales people from Fusion-io were just going out
the same doors. Anyway - they met up with Fusion-io's CEO David Flynn and did a deal.
I almost forgot... You may be wondering - what do I mean by my
headline? - the "finally SANward bound" part?
Well - when
Fusion-io came to market -
4 years ago
(September 25, 2007) - a lot of the publicity following their launch talked
about their product being a SAN SSD.
Of course it wasn't - but it was
just their way of communicating with simple editors and analysts who didn't
know any better - that they were in the enterprise SSD market space. Because at
that time (in 2007) the SAN market was already
13 years old and well
understood - whereas the PCIe
SSD market wasn't. |
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Nowdays many other
companies also sell Fusion-io inside - for example 3 server companies whose
names are composed of 2, 3 and 4 letter words / acronyms - but the K2 is the
first time that Fusion-io's ioMemory modules have appeared in a collaboratively
designed and marketed - unashamedly
FC SAN storage product. | | | |
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| Kaminario
carves new market niche for RAM SSDs |
Editor:- March 28, 2011 -
Kaminario
announced immediate availability of its
K2
DRAM storage appliance a family of enterprise
FC SAN
rackmount
RAM SSDs which scales
up to 12TB and delivers 1.5 million IOPS with 16 GB/s throughput.
K2's
entry level configuration provides 500GB of storage and delivers 150,000 IOPS
with 1.6 GB/s throughput for $50,000. Kaminario's K2 has true N+1 high
availability, including mirrored storage with automatic data recovery, redundant
fibre channel connectivity and a
UPS, to
reduce the risk of losing data access.
Editor's comments:- I
spoke to
Gareth Taube,
VP of Marketing and Dani Golan
CEO about the new product and how they see Kaminario in the SSD market. We had a
wide ranging discussion about the challenges in the enterprise SSD market,
the growing new role of RAM SSDs, and how they solve the competing demands of
reliability and
speed. You can see
those details in a new article published later today.
Overall I got
the impression this is a company which really understands its market niche well
and fills an important gap in the enterprise acceleration space which is not
catered for economically by other vendors.
Re customers:- Kaminario
said "Everyone has an application where performance limits the business."
Kaminario
said most of their customers already had experience with 2 or 3 previous SSD
projects. Like all new SSD companies they like to talk about the successes
they've had with accelerating enterprise apps performance in what I call the "usual
suspects" - banks and other financial institutions - 10x speedup here, 25x
speedup there. We've heard all that stuff
before.
But Kaminario's products also match the budgets and performance needs
of smaller companies in new markets. One of their customers in this category
is
Digital Trowel which extracts data
from web sites and uses analysis and inference techniques to provide real-time
alerts and predictions about stocks, prices, news and other significant
market
developments. That's a good example of the "only with an SSD"
can you do this - data factory model killer app which I had in mind when I
wrote my
petabyte SSD roadmap
article last year.
Digital Trowel 's CTO,
Anton Bar said - "Other
SSD storage had the same price, but much lower speed than the Kaminario K2 -
a clear no-brainer. The bottom line is, the K2 shortened our identity
resolution process by about 50%, and that's very important in our line of
business."
Kaminario said its sweet spot in the hot data capacity range upto
12TB which is on the SAN
and which has very high IOPS demand. Because Kaminario is unashamedly a RAM
SSD company. Their "IOPS performance" doesn't need to be
qualified by
small print and hedging statements like those of flash SSDs. And I'll be
saying more about the internal technology elsewhere.
Kaminario said
that many of their customers - having experienced the K2 - were now acting
as internal evangelists to other parts of their organizations to advise them
how to solve performance problems which had previously proved intractable to
solutions by flash SSDs (due to latency) and traditional RAM SSDs (due to the
complexities
and side effects of failover architectures). |
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Rackmount RAM SSDs connected
by fibre-channel have been available from multiple vendors for over 10 years.
Kaminario has shown that a new company can still shake up and surprise the
enterprise SSD market. | | | |
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| Kaminario reduces costs in
new HA rackmount |
Editor:- April 18, 2013 - "You don't have to
be an investment bank like JP Morgan to afford our style of fast, scalable
high availability SSD systems any more" - was the key message I got
talking to Phil
Williams, VP Business Development at Kaminario earlier
this week when discussing with me aspects of the company's newest series of
FC SAN compatible SSD
arrays - the
K2 v4 (6TB usable per U at a cost of $10K to $15K per TB) which was
launched
yesterday.
Phil was referring to the expectation that their products -
which in the first generation were entirely
RAM based SSDs - and
then moved onto RAM / flash hybrids and then mostly pure flash (the flash
components being implemented in the previous generation of K2's by
Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs
- a relationship direction which I suggested in a much earlier briefing
conversation with Kaminario's CEO few years ago BTW ) - had acquired a
reputation of being out of reach pricewise - and not just in a class of their
own for resilience and
scalability.
One
of the ways that Kaminario has pulled off the affordability trick is to drop
PCIe SSDs as the internal flash components and use instead
SAS SSDs.
I've
said before that in the enterprise arrays space - "SAS is the new SATA"
- because there are so many companies which have moved into this segment
that there's stiff competition.
Unlike the PCIe SSD market -which is
mostly sold on high performance - the SAS market includes a number of vendors
who have been using
adaptive R/W
ECC to enable them to use cheap flash to build reliable
fast-enough SSDs
Because Kaminario still has a lot of
RAM cache in
its server based architecture - it doesn't need the raw
endurance
and performance of
FIO's ioMemory to deliver multi-gigabyte throughput at the rack level. And
another factor is that Fusion-io itself is on course to become a significant
supplier of rackmount SSDs (although not aimed at the same kind of customers.)
Kaminario didn't want to say which SAS product they're using. They
might say later. But it doesn't really matter.
The K2 v4 also
demonstrates that the key IP component in Kaminario's box is SSD software.
When I suggested that future boxes could equally well discard SAS SSDs if
2.5" PCIe SSDs
offered a better set of characteristics - Phil agreed that the company wasn't
tied to any particular internal SSD drive form factor or interface.
Kaminario
has paid Taneja Group
to do some new testing on the performance aspects of simulated hard faults.
These will be very useful for customers - and take the uncertainty out of the
picture - giving hard numbers for various scenarios.
For example - when
running at just under 200K
IOPS and
5GB/s throughput - an entire node (controller) was removed to simulate a fault.
I/O resumed after 23 seconds and performance dropped by less than 15% for 2
minutes before recovering fully. | | |
| .. |
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| .. |
the top SSD companies
11 key SSD symmetries
7 apps silos for enterprise
SSDs
where
are we now with SSD software?
the survivors
guide to enterprise SSDs
the story of flash
SSDs in the enterprise
Efficiency - making the
same SSD - while using less flash |
| . |
| when it comes to SSD
speedup - Oracle users are evenly split between server and SAN |
| Editor:- October 11, 2012 - Among other
findings
in a survey of 400 attendees (pdf) which was run by Kaminario at the
recent Oracle OpenWorld
event - it was found that among the 30% of those who had already used flash
SSD acceleration - the use of internal (server based) and external (SAN rack
based) SSDs was divided nearly evenly - 48% and 52% respectively. | | |
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| .. |
| Kaminario does that 20GB/s
SPC thing |
Editor:- October 1, 2012 - Kaminario today
announced
a new industry-leading
SPC
1 benchmark performance of greater than 2 million IOPS and 20GB/s
throughput in a single cabinet 60TB usable MLC-based
fault tolerant
K2
storage system - which costs just under $0.5 million (including 3 years
maintenance).
Editor's comments:- funding these public
benchmarks is expensive. Kaminario - which last week
announced
additional investments by Mitsui
- has received almost $70 million in funding. | | |
| .. |
| Kaminario recommends you
read SSD Symmetries article |
Editor:- June 15, 2012 - I accidentally
discovered today that earlier this week Gareth Taube,
VP of Marketing at Kaminario
published a new blog
in which he recommends my article about
SSD Symmetries.
Gareth
says "Flexibility, such as being able to integrate multiple memory
technologies into a single box (like Kaminario's K2-H), is going to be
increasingly important to customers who want efficiency and customization
options. This is especially true because there are many memory innovations
coming on the near horizon." ...read Gareth's blog
Editor's
comments:- when I was writing the symmetry article one of the things I had in
mind to do was to put more examples in it. Then I realized that having lots of
examples would simply make the article unreadable.
One of the examples
I was going to use for good roadmap symmetry (but then forgot to put
anywhere) was in fact Kaminario - because they can leverage off whatever
Fusion-io does with
flash (or other nv memory)
and furthermore Kaminario can also leverage off whatever server makers do with
CPUs and RAM. Roadmap
symmetry is a long term consideration - important for big users who don't like
supplier churn and important for
VCs and investors too.
...Later:-
I'm glad I wrote that bit about "roadmap symmetry" - because by a
spooky coincidence - 3 days later we got the news that Kaminario's investors
still love what they do.
June 18, 2012 - Kaminario today
announced
it has secured a $25 million series D round of funding, bringing its total
funding to $65 million. | | |
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| Kaminario speeds pet pill
processing |
Editor:- May 21, 2012 - Kaminario
today published a
case
study (pdf) which describes how PetMed
Express (a leading online pet pharmacy) saw a 4x performance
improvement in its report processing and operational processes.
Editor's
comments:- OK - I admit it. SSD makes something run faster isn't really a
news story.
"SSD makes system run slower - but customer is very
satisfied and says they would be happy to pay even more" - would be a
better SSD news story instead.
It seems I will use any excuse to
link the themes of SSDs, animals and medecine. Have I no shame? Guess not.
See
also:-
Animal brands in
the SSD market, MLC flash lives
longer in my SSD care program | | |
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