Kaminario: We've made K2 faster, cheaper - NOW will you buy all-flash arrays?

The VC-backed storage crew at Kaminario make three types of K2 array: K2-D, which has DRAM modules; K2-H, with both DRAM and flash; and K2-F, which is all-flash and uses Fusion-io flash cards. But despite a market which is somewhat put off by the high cost of all-flash products - and despite a slew of rivals entering the same …

[Matthew Morris]

Hmm

Was it the move away from the FusionIO kit that increased performance and lowered their cost.....

[Kaminario]

Re: Hmm

Moving to SAS MLC Flash enabled us to use 8 SAS bays vs. using one or two PCIe slots per Node. This is one of the primary drivers of our performance (IOPS & Throughput) improvement and cost reduction: improved density per node. There were other optimizations to enable the same cause.

[John Savard]

Lifetime

But flash memory has a strictly limited lifetime in write cycles. So, while it's fast, there are a lot of applications for which it is not well-suited.

[Kaminario]

Re: Lifetime

We offer a 7 YEAR flash endurance warranty (i.e. we will replace the SSD for free if it wears out -- and the replacement process involves no downtime of course).

We can provide this warranty because we have superior parallelization of I/O and a true scale out architecture which spreads the data and metadata across all the nodes -- based on our burn-in testing, we will not wear out the SSD during that period, even under heavy load.

7 Years is a long time in the IT world -- it should in practice cover the lifetime of the system. So Kaminario is not just fast but has great endurance for a large breadth of workload profiles (OLTP, Analytics, Virtualized database/applications and Virtual desktops)