Posts by Shachar Fielblit, CTO, Kaminario

Flash in the pan? Dell 3D TLC AFAs are cheaper than spinning rust

It is great to see that 3D TLC technology is arriving to the enterprise. $1.66/GB is an interesting price point for raw capacity but a more modern storage array that is tuned for flash and support advanced data reduction functionality can bring a solution with much better endurance together with lower cost per usable capacity.

Shachar Fienblit

CTO

Kaminario

All-flash is a synonym for a tough market

Flash media is here to stay. The cost of Flash media is declining rapidly and in order to gain the benefit of Flash media and other new technologies the modern AFA players built a new architecture that is the next generation storage architecture. A modern AFA architecture like Kaminario is a true agile and dynamic infrastructure that meets new customer challenges. It is a scalable and cost-efficient architecture and today it is concentrated on solving real applications needs. This is why the new AFA architectures are winning when competing against the legacy architectures.

I totally agree that storage will continue to evolve and these system will need to add more functionality in order to continue with the exponential growth. Here comes another advantage of the new modern architectures. The new modern AFAs built a true agile infrastructure that will allow them to add new functionality a lot easier compare to legacy architectures that were not designed for the new challenges. I expect to see the AFA vendors adding new modern functionalities faster and by doing this continue to have products that are a better fit to new evolving customer needs.

Shachar Fienblit, CTO, Kaminario

Don't start reading the last rites for monolithic storage just yet

Monolithic storage architectures were built when the undelying storage technology was different and workloads were very different from today. These systems served customer needs well 20-5 years ago and utilized the underlying HDD and server technology. Today’s things are very different. Businesses are challenged to be much more agile and act in real time to business needs. They need to meet the new challenges in a cost-efficient way and the complexity, cost and low performance of monolithic systems truly makes them elephants…

The improvement in the undelying technology brings a real opportunity to build better system that meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. In particular, Flash technology is changing the landscape of storage systems. Flash is used in variety of ways in new storage architectures and the fast improvement in cost/density make it a clear winner that is here to stay. In fact, with the introduction of 3D NAND and TLC technology the Flash technology advancement is faster than Moor’s law. This makes systems that are optimized for Flash the most cost-efficient solutions to more and more use cases. Monolithic storage solutions were not designed for this technology advancement and I see even quicker transition to modern scale-out storage architectures that are optimized for Flash and are flexible to allow customers scale their storage/data needs easily and cost efficiently.

Shachar Fienblit, CTO, Kaminario