Never heard of Kaminario? Neither has most of the world. Kaminario is a small All-Flash Array manufacture out of Newton, MA. This storage company is starting to grain some traction with their All-Flash K2 array, even while based out of storage giant EMC’s backyard. Last weekend I was looking at Kaminario and what they offer to the AFA market. They seem like a pretty cool company with a solid product but I have never heard of them until now. So my curiosity lead to some digging and here are some note worthy points I found:
Scalability:
- They can Scale-Up and Scale-Out
- Per their website their maximum scale is 4X K-nodes ( each node has dual active/active controllers)
- They leverage infiniband to connect the nodes.
- For Scale Up, a second SSD shelf containing another 24 SSDs may be added.
- Per their website their maximum scale is 4X K-nodes ( each node has dual active/active controllers)
- 4X K-Nodes = 26U 720TB usable (Guarantee 3:1 data reduction | Average 6:1 data reduction) 1 million IOPS at $2 per GB
- At VMworld they were saying they can go to 8 K-nodes , 1.4PB and 2 million IOPS but their published data sheet does not reflect this data.
Performance:
- Kaminario has published SPC1 and SPC2 benchmarks.
- My guess would be XtremIO is the same or they might be a little better.
- In a mixed workload, they leverage an adaptive block size to handle the “IO blender affect” of multiple types/sizes of IO.
- There is no Quality of Service mechanism for I/O performance but there is however QoS on capacity which I find odd.
Maintenance:
- Standard is 3 years but they guarantee all Flash drives for 7 years and a 3:1 data reduction.
- If you do not see a data Reduction of 3:1 they will provide the required capacity at zero cost to the customer.
Data protection: (local, remote, etc)
- For data protection they claim they can lose 3 drives per shelf with zero data loss and impact to performance.
- 2 of the drives can fail at once
- Nodes have a built-in Battery for protection from power outages.
- They do not yet offer Replication (Q4 roadmap).
- They do offer Snapshots.
- Their data sheets claim 8000 snapshots and at VMworld they said they support 4 snaps per LUN.
- Kaminario also offer encryption on data at rest.
Kaminario as a Company:
- About 3X year-on-year growth in the quarter’s bookings,
- 60% of bookings are net new accounts
- 25% growth in employees compared to the previous quarter.
- Kaminario co-founder and CEO Dani Golan expects to maintain the quarter’s 25 per cent head count growth rate over the next 12 months.
Pricing:
- In May, Kaminario announced the release of its fifth-generation K2 (K2 v5). The K2 v5 with all software-included, with an average pricing of $2/GB guaranteed effective capacity.
Overall, Kaminario is a very interesting company who look really good on paper. Their K2 product looks very similar to XtremIO in how it scales out but can also add a tray of flash drives (like PURE). I have not had the chance to play with a K2 box yet but I hope too one day. I can’t imagine it will be to long until this ankle bitter finds itself on EMC and PURE’s radar.