Kaminario Launches 4th-Gen K2 All-Flash Arrays

Newton, Mass.-based enterprise flash storage systems vendor Kaminario took the wraps off its fourth generation K2, the company’s line of solid-state flash arrays, today.

Last year, the company turned its attention to high availability and data protection by focusing on the K2’s underlying software operating environment. The result was RAID 10HD — ‘HD’ stands for hybrid distributed — striping and mirroring, which provides non-disruptive, automatic failover and restore services by maintaining copies of data on DRAM, flash and flash backups.

Now, the company is turning its attention back to across-the-board performance increases and improved efficiency.

Targeting midrange enterprises, the K2 v.4 arrives in “a much smaller, denser, greener and lower-priced configuration,” boasted Kaminario in a statement. CEO Dani Golan took to his company’s blog to detail the potentially beneficial impact that the new K2 — available in iSCSI and Fibre Channel flavors — can have on data centers, IT budgets and the enterprise storage market as a whole.

“With K2 v4 we have been able to increase the density by more than 500 percent while cutting the price in half. Why is this so significant? Lowering the cost of enterprise-ready solid-state flash storage has been one of the long-time goals of the industry,” wrote Golan.

Kaminario claims that the new array delivers 400 percent more read/write bandwidth than its predecessors along with “with consistently low latency (120-microsecond writes).” Also new are non-disrupting upgrades and hot swappable SAS drives.

Advances in the company’s Scale-Out Architecture help the arrays maintain resilient operations and application availability in the event of a failure. In most cases, users will barely notice that their storage infrastructure took a hit. “For most workloads the performance levels of our solutions will be minimally impacted—usually less than 10 percent,” informed Golan.

The new upgrades add up to a compelling proposition for organizations that are pondering a move to SSD-based arrays, says Dan Iacono, research director, Storage Systems, IDC.

“The enterprise market organizations seeking to invest in all-Flash solid-state storage arrays are demanding performance, scalability and reliability. Kaminario, with its next generation of K2, promises to deliver a scalable high-performance platform that is affordable for midrange to high-end environments,” stated Iacono in press remarks.

It’s a view shared by Storage Switzerland president and founder George Crump, who noted that the array may prove attractive to budget-conscious IT shops with an aversion to downtime and application outages.

“Kaminario has done a good job of taking the high cost out of SSD storage with their new K2 all-Flash array. They are also the only vendor we know of who can maintain high performance in a degraded mode, such as during an SSD failure,” said Crump.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Internet News, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.