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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
- mentions on StorageSearch.com and
Kaminario's blog | |
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Kaminario summary
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| Who's who in SSD? - Kaminario | |
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- February 2014
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.
Kaminario's original systems were
RAM SSDs. That seemed a
brave choice at the time - given that the enterprise market had been
moving towards
flash since 2004. In a conversation I had with company's CEO in March 2011 -
I said there was a lot of synergy in the user base between their ideal customers
and those of Fusion-io - and as they weren't competitors (at that time) - I
suggested that Kaminario should talk to Fusion-io about some kind of
collaborative business development.
So later that year - in September
2011 - when Kaminario introduced flash into its product mix using
PCIe SSDs sourced
from Fusion-io - I
wasn't greatly surprised.
Less than a quarter after that - in February
2012
Kaminario told me that nearly half the systems it was shipping included
flash.
Nowadays - in 2014 - like over 99% of the enterprise SSD market -
Kaminario is primarily a flash systems supplier.
In its 4th generation
product - the K2 v4 - launched in April 2013 - the company changed its internal
flash strategy to use SAS
SSDs supplied by SanDisk.
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,
WhipTail and
Fusion-io.
In
the 4th quarter of 2013 - Kaminario reaffirmed the legitimacy of its claims
to be faster - by announcing its results in 2 audited benchmarkes:-
- SPC-2
price performance - in which the same Kaminario system (above) beat a bunch
of named competitors in a cost effectiveness comparison for high end
transaction processing
related articles
how fast can your SSD
run backwards?
exciting new
directions in rackmount SSDs
flash wars in the
enterprise - from SLC to 3D and TLC
The enterprise
flash story... could it have been simplified?
Decloaking
hidden user preference segments in enterprise flash
90%
of enterprise SSD companies have no good reasons to survive
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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.
In May 2014
Kaminario launched its
5th generation K2 enterprise rackmount SSD system
priced at $2 per
usable GB. In this context - "usable GB" is the effective virtual
capacity seen by the customer's apps when Kaminario's compression and dedupe are
in operation. (See also:-
Exiting
the Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing.)
In
January 2015
- Kaminario
said
its bookings in Q4 2014 were 2x the level of Q3 2014 - which
necessitated a further $15 million funding. |
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| enterprise aristocrats in
SSD |
Editor:- March 14, 2014 - 7 years is the
standard expected service life for a good
industrial SSD -
but in the enterprise SSD market 4 years may be long enough to earn a company
its place for elevation into the elite ranks of the aristocracy - for
class-act companies which have been seen regularly in all the right places -
such as the Top SSD
Companies Lists.
I didn't realize I was already unconsciously
thinking this way - but the thought sprang into my frontal lobes in response
to a short email from Bill
Bodei - who is Senior Director of North American Channels at Kaminario.
Bill
said - Big fan of your writings.... (on StorageSearch.com)
I said -
Kaminario sure gave me some interesting things to write about for a while. Now
everyones a born again SSD server genius just because they can write the cloud
version of hello SSD world. But the more you engage with customers the more
you learn. So there are still some advantages for the enterprise SSD
aristocrats like Kaminario - of having been engaged in the market for more
than a few quarters.
Bill replied - Yes it sure has become a crowded market quickly. We're
busy here, heads down, working towards a milestone that promises to give you
more to write about, while doing our part to disrupt and leapfrog this nascent
market of ours as we evolve into adolescence. :) | | |
| .. |
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
reasons
and routes towards future enterprise SSD market consolidation |
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| Kaminario recommends you
read SSD Symmetries article |
Editor:- June 15, 2012 - I accidentally
discovered today that 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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| 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. | | | |
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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). |
|
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
passes K2 AFA hardware baton to Tech Data |
Editor:- January 17, 2018 - 2017 was a difficult
year for AFA vendors whose primary IP was software - as they couldn't be
sure how much they would have to pay for their memory based hardware and
couldn't be sure either if and when they would get it. However, even without
the memory shortages it was inevitable that vendors would one day have to align
themselves with new trends
towards
more strongly delineated standard product roles.
That day has
dawned for Kaminario
- which had already churned its hardware deliverables suppliers several
times since entering the
rackmount SSD
market in June
2010.
Kaminario today
announced
it is exiting the hardware market as a supplier and is switching to a software
business model. The company's K2 arrays will be supplied in future by Tech
Data. Kaminario will continue to provide centralized support management for all
datacenter implementations based on Kaminario software. | | |
| .. |
| AFA
market revenue grew to $1.6B in 3Q17 |
Editor:- December 6, 2017 - "AFA market
revenue grew 33% yoy in 3Q17, reaching $1.6 Billion" according to a new
report -
Storage
Systems Quarterly - published by Dell'Oro
Group.
"All Flash Array is a very important technology
segment in external storage. In fact, as a percentage of external storage
revenue, it has been growing dramaticallyfrom 22% in 3Q16 to 28% in 3Q17. So
every vendor is determined to expand their position in all-flash storage systems"
said Jimmy Yu,
VP at Dell'Oro Group.
Editor's comments:- Dell'Oro's press release
lists the 5 biggest vendors and the company can provide more analytical data in
their purchaseable reports.
more market research stories | | |
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| Kaminario offers free iPads
to boost K2 tryouts |
Editor:- October 4, 2016 - I saw a promotional
email offer from Kaminario
today which I think may backfire as it seems to be in direct conflict with the
ethical principles of buyers in many large organizations.
The
promotional email says "Test and evaluate a Kaminario K2 all flash array
with up to 50TB capacity for as little as $1.25 per GB and iPAD management
console for 45 days. Try it today and the iPad is yours to keep."
There's
also a supporting sign up web page for the offer.
Editor's
comments:- I think the offer will turn off buyers in big companies - because
the inducement of a free iPad to take part in the evaluation sounds like a
personal gift rather than having any benefit for the evaluating organization.
Seems to me that the marketers in Kaminario have been reading too many consumer
marketing comics. | | |
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3D TLC is good enough to
last 7 years
in 1 DWPD Kaminario customer base |
| SSD news (August
2015) | | |
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| Kaminario gets another $53
million funding |
Editor:-
December 2, 2014 - Kaminario
today
announced
it has closed an oversubscribed $53 million financing round, bringing total
raised capital to $128 million. Kaminario says it will use the new investment
to accelerate business growth.
Editor's comments:- Kaminario
rose 3 places compared to the previous quarter - in the recently published
Top SSD Companies in
Q3 2014. | | |
| .. |
| Kaminario guarantees
amplified usable capacity |
Editor:- May 20, 2014 - When I saw that Kaminario would be
talking about a
cost of around
$2,000 per usable terabyte of SSD storage in its new 5th generation K2
enterprise rackmount
launched
today - my gut feel was - this price metric must be based on some kind of
SSD utilization
amplified capacity figure - rather than the conventionally
discounted
raw storage capacity - because I know that Kaminario isn't in the
deep flash IP
controller business - and unless I've been asleep and missed something -
this kind of headline figure isn't coming from arrays of
COTS
flash drives.
So I asked the company about it - and was told that the "average
$2/GB usable cost includes data reduction with Kaminario's guaranteed effective
capacity offering (meaning they will provide customers with incremental free
hardware if their original capacity needs aren't met)."
And when
I probed again - does it apply to channel sales and well as direct sales? - I
got confirmation that indeed it does.
I think this is very
significant.
Because guarantees are the way to add weight to an SSD vendor's
convictions that they are confident about what they're claiming.
9 years ago in the
enterprise SSD market - we saw the world's first performance guarantees
being given - about raw speed claims.
And similar to that in
historic
significance - I think that
Kaminario's
K2 v5 product launch will be remembered - not for the product
specifications - but for ushering in a new era in enterprise SSD marketing -
in which the increased utilization from
software - stops being
a wishy washy averaged (sometimes you might get it, but other times you won't)
concept which sounds good in a news headline - of the type we've seen from a
lot of other vendors in recent years - and instead becomes a guaranteed figure -
like endurance - which users can learn to trust.
If Kaminario can
stand behind its usable capacity amplification claims - then other vendors
should do the same - or stop talking about promises they're not confident
enough to stand behind.
And if some vendors say - we don't know the
workload - so how can we provide a guarantee?
I'd say - get to know
your customers better - or risk losing a lot of business because the
alternatives are offering over specified, over priced systems - which work - or
under-specified, under-priced systems which might fail early.
...Later:-
June 24, 2014 - on the theme of interesting new pricing models for
rackmounts SSDs - see this article -
an SSD
conversation with Tegile | | |
.. |
| If you've seen or read -
The Hobbit - then you'll be familiar with the concept of the riddle game.
Something similar is playing out now in the enterprise flash array market. |
| playing the enterprise
SSD box riddle game | | |
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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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| 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. | | |
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