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Kaminario All Solid-State Flash and DRAM SAN Storage Technology

Most of today’s performance challenges in large organizations are a result of I/O bottlenecks. Powerful servers are barely utilized, and are often idly waiting. All currently available solutions are either very expensive, do not solve the problem, or both.

Kaminario’s innovative, patented technology delivers unrivaled performance, reliability, and cost-effective implementation. Kaminario’s Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture™ (SPEAR) enables its Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage solutions to support millions of IOPS, tens of GB/s of throughput, ultra-low latency, and all without compromising on high availability. The K2 is the only SAN storage solution to support both MLC Flash and DRAM solid-state media for accelerating application and database performance. Put the data of your most demanding application or database on Kaminario K2 storage and achieve application performance and high availability that you have never seen before, all with less than a day of implementation.

Request K2 Architecture White Paper.

Kaminario Scale-Out Performance Storage Architecture

SPEAR Storage OS is a fundamentally new and better way to store and retrieve performance sensitive data. Kaminario K2 SPEAR combines off-the-shelf blade servers, solid state drive (SSD) media (DRAM and/or MLC Flash) and the revolutionary SPEAR Storage Operating System to create a blazingly fast, highly available, and easy to deploy SAN. The Kaminario K2 is the first solution that allows freedom of choice between DRAM and/or Flash media to accommodate the performance needs of various applications.

Freedom of Choice

Not all applications require the same level of storage performance or cost. The Kaminario K2 is the first true enterprise all solid-state SAN storage to allow customers the freedom to choose the right SSD media type for their specific application performance requirements, workload, and budget. Now customers can choose between DRAM, Flash, or a combination of the two, to deliver specific performance levels for each set of application data. The Kaminario K2 represents freedom of choice in a single storage system and all without compromising on enterprise reliability or ease of use.

Kaminario K2 Storage System Hardware

The Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage solutions are complete systems comprised of the following industry standard, high-end hardware components: Rack – Standard 42” casings to house the K2 components Enclosures – Hold blade servers, along with switches Blade Servers – Blades are the “smart” components; they manage the data and hold DRAM and/or Flash (MLC) SSDs for primary storage and mirrored HDDs or Flash SSDs for data backup and redundancy Switches – Three types of switches are used in a Kaminario K2: Fibre Channel (FC) – Exposes the Kaminario K2 FC ports to multiple external hosts 10 GbE – Interconnects all blades for the purpose of sending host data between the blades 1 GbE – Interconnects all blades for the purpose of supporting management communications between the blades Uninterrupted Power Supplies (UPS) – Two UPSs for continuous power The core of Kaminario K2 is SPEAR which is made up of industry standard hardware components and Kaminario’s unique SPEAR Storage Operating System (OS). SPEAR enables the Kaminario K2 to provide blazingly fast application performance, high availability, scalability, and ease of deployment and management.

Kaminario SPEAR Storage Operating System

The SPEAR OS exposes industry standard SSD-based (DRAM and/or Flash) block level storage to applications as logical shares. It manages the following SPEAR components:

ioDirectors — Responsible for managing and exposing data to host servers as standard block devices and dynamically performing load balancing to optimize system resources utilization and scalability.

• A cluster of modular, industry standard blade-based I/O distribution controllers (Fibre Channel) interconnected via a 10 GbE network.
• Dynamically performs I/O load balancing
• Maximizes performance

DataNodes — Responsible for storing and mirroring data for redundancy and high availability. DataNodes contain SSD DRAM, Flash or a combination of the two, to deliver specific performance levels for each set of application data. The DataNodes also support a layer of mirrored HDDs or Flash SSDs for data redundancy.

• Two tiers of distributed SSD (DRAM and/or Flash) media and backup storage devices delivers performance, scalability and reliability without compromises
• DRAM and Flash SSDs for delivering extreme performance and scalability to I/O requests
• Mirrored HDDs or Flash SSDs for self-healing high availability

The SPEAR Storage OS is composed of three fundamental patented software capabilities:

• Automated Data Distribution™ – Automatically senses the capacity available both in the I/O and storage tiers of the distributed storage grid. SPEAR optimizes data distribution by dynamically and randomly allocating data over all nodes. The result is an ultra efficient use of the available resources that speeds processing and eliminates idle areas and hot spots. SPEAR continually balances data distribution for optimum performance.
• Intelligent Parallel I/O Processing™ – I/O requests are distributed across the K2 storage grid smartly parallelizing all reads and writes. Requests are automatically balanced based upon available compute resources resulting in consistently high performance and ultra low latency.
• Self Healing Data Availability™ – SPEAR is designed to maintain data availability through any type of failure. N+1 availability is built into the hardware, but it is the SPEAR storage OS software that manages the dynamic grid re-configuration in the event of a failure. Hot spots are eliminated, failures are worked around quickly, and I/O is continuously balanced to deliver blazingly fast and reliable performance.

Kaminario K2 SPEAR

Kaminario Storage System Management and GUI

• Unified storage system management simplifies storage installation, configuration, and monitoring
• Dynamic load balancing of the complete system to ensure that the work load is distributed for the highest performance and scalability
• Automatically distributes data across the system
• Simplifies and automates the complexity of storage installation, configuration, and management
• Sophisticated distributed data layout – no hot spots
• High availability and automatic recovery for system resiliency
• Application performance monitoring across the entire storage system
• Graphic User Interface

View video demonstration of the Kaminario K2 Management GUI.

Kaminario SPEAR Features

• Grid-in-a-box, distributed scale-out architecture
• Open hardware, high-end industry standard components
• Freedom of Choice of SSD media (DRAM/Flash)
• Automated Data Distribution to eliminate idle areas and hot spots
• Intelligent Parallel I/O Processing for the highest speed and consistent performance
• Self Healing Data Availability for consistent data reliability and resiliency
• DRAM and/or SSDs for accessible storage and mirrored HDDs or Flash SSDs for backup
• Independent scalability of performance and capacity and greater scalability than PCIe cards alone
• Supports any application with no modification or tuning regardless of the load

Kaminario’s SPEAR is the basis for its simple to deploy, easy to use, non-intrusive Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage that does not require data or process changes of any kind. In addition, Kaminario’s performance professionals have the expertise required to help you analyze and maximize your application performance. Kaminario is simply faster.

"Our validation testing has confirmed that Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage solutions are fast, safe and easy. Combining the cost effective speed of Flash and the blazingly fast performance of DRAM devices in a Fiber Channel attached storage solution with enterprise-class high availability, the K2 all solid-state SAN storage is ideally suited to meet the needs of performance-hungry business-critical database applications."

- Brian Garrett, vice president, ESG Lab, Enterprise Strategy Group

For more information or a performance assessment of your application environment, contact Kaminario's Storage Performance Solutions experts.