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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 -September 2011
Kaminario markets an
FC SAN rackmount SSD
(called the
K2)
which is implemented by a grid of hot removable blade servers meshed into a
RAID-like structure of UPS
and HDD
backed up protected
random access memory. The K2 is designed to have
no single point of
failure and can rebuild itself and use new storage when new blades are
inserted.
The main advantage of this architecture is that it
offers a high reliability SSD as a standard product.
The main disadvantages
of this architecture are that it offers much lower storage density and much
slower latencies (typically
10x to 20x slower than the
fastest FC SAN
SSDs) and much higher cost. But if you compare it like for like with other
fault tolerant
SSD racks - the price per terabyte is similar and the latency - while not
the best - is still better than some others.
Nevertheless - the K2
still manages to offer performance which is competitive against hard disk arrays
- and the cost, density and latency comparison with standalone SSD products
tend to blur when you step back and take into focus failover and replication
schemes (which are add-ons to most other products).
The performance
and complexity issues which arise from retrofitting backup and failover into FC
SSD arrays are discussed best in the article -
Consistency
Groups: the Trouble with Stand-alone SSDs written by
Woody Hutsell
- Application Acceleration Practice Director at
ViON.
When
Kaminario launched the K2 in March 2011 - it was RAM SSD only. But in September
2011 the company extended its blade range to offer flash - implemented by
Fusion-io's PCI SSDs.
That enables users to configure the K2 as RAM only, flash only, or as a hybrid
(approx 80:20 flash to RAM).
In the hybrid mode - the K2 doesn't do
auto-tiering -
instead - users allocate the flash versus RAM SSD space by setting up LUNs.
With
Fusion-io as the flash option inside its SAN SSD - Kaminario has neatly
solved 3 business problems:-
.
- technical (no need to reinvent the wheel),
- marketing (best
known enterprise SSD brand) and
- business development - because Fusion-io has an option to resell or endorse
the K2 product to its own customers who need legacy fibre-channel connectivity
in addition to its own
new dynasty PCIe
style of doing things. And because Kaminario is a
software company
(which uses standard hardware) and not a hardware company (which designs its own
chips) - there's less risk of letting a future PCIe SSD card competitor into the
shared customer door.
Overall from my conversations with the company I
get the impression Kaminario has a good understanding of where the
enterprise SSD market is heading - and a clear idea of how they can carve out a
sustainable segment of that market which they hope to satisfy with a uniquely
competitive set of technical and business attributes. Their way is not the only
way to sell enterprise SSDs, and it's not the fastest, and it's not the
cheapest. But the market for a credible fast-enough SAN SSD - which does the
whole job wrapped in a single standard package - and with a scalable
architecture which tracks server and memory technologies - should be
big enough to
keep any investors happy for the next few years. |
| .... |
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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. |
| . |
| 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). |
 |
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. | | | |
| . |
|
| |
| 2012 - Year of the
Enterprise SSD Goldrush |
| . |
| "By 2016 I expect
that upto 50% of the searches for rackmount SSD will be driven by the
need to find the lowest cost storage capacity - instead of (as today)
98% being driven by the need for faster storage performance." |
| ......from a new article about -
Rackmount SSDs | | |
| . |
 |
| . |
| 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." | | | |
| . |
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| . |
| 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. | | | |
| ... |
SSD news
the SSD Heresies
the SSD Buyers Guide
SSD Jargon Explained
a new way of looking at
Enterprise SSDs
Market Trends in the
Rackmount SSD Market
the
future of enterprise data storage (circa 2020)
RAM SSDs versus Flash
SSDs - which is Best? | |
