Kaminario, a Newton, Mass.-based enterprise flash storage company, today took the wraps off the fifth-generation K2 (K2 v5) SSD-based arrays.
In terms of budget-friendly storage, Kaminario CEO Dani Golan views the new hardware as his company’s biggest challenge yet to traditional, disk-based arrays. His company’s latest K2 hardware delivers SAN capacity at “an average price of $2 per GB that’s usable to the customer,” he told InfoStor.
Cost-savings are achieved, in part, by the company’s bundled storage management software approach. Among the included capabilities is global inline selective deduplication.
Golan explained that storage space-saving tech “allows the customer to choose if they want the dedupe to be on or off per application or per volume.” Combined with built-in thin provisioning, global compression, efficient metadata management and K-RAID data protection, a RAID 6 scheme that delivers 87.5 percent utilization, Golan boasted that Kaminario’s arrays deliver the most usable capacity among competing arrays.
“In our agreement with our customers, if they can’t reach their capacity, we give them more hardware,” said Golan. “We never had to give hardware,” he added.
Called K-Blocks, Kaminario’s arrays are available in single, dual or quad configurations. A 1 K-Block deployment consists of a 4U array and 2U expansion module. Storage network connectivity options include 8 Gb per second Fibre Channel and 10 GbE iSCI.
K2 v5 supports 400 GB and 800 GB SSDs enterprise MLC SSDs, providing a storage density of up to 30 TB per rack unit. A 1 K-Block configuration can deliver up to 250,000 IOPS, performance that scales up to 1 million IOPS in a 4 K-Block setup. Bandwidth ranges from a base 3.2 GB per second (1 K-Block) to up to 12.8 GB per second. Latency is rated at 0.35 milliseconds.
“It’s very evident we’re going after legacy storage,” said Golan. “At four to five times the density and scaling up to 180 TB [in a 1 K-Block configuration],” he said that in the storage industry, it “is really density that equates to dollars at the end of the day.”
IDC Research Director Eric Burgener said in prepared remarks that the industry is in the grips of a “surge in demand” for scalable and cost-effective flash arrays. K2 v5 fits the bill, delivering high-performance enterprise storage capabilities “with generally far fewer storage devices than traditional spinning disk-based arrays, requiring significantly lower power consumption, floor space, and backup infrastructure that translate to a compelling economic proposition.”