Scale-Out Performance and Resilience Architecture

SPEAR is the brains of the K2 system, an operating system reliant only on commodity hardware. With 38 patents in process, SPEAR is an industry first scale-out architecture purpose-built for SSD flash to solve performance issues inherent in legacy HDD storage while providing enterprise-class resiliency customers require for their business critical applications.

Scale-Out is Next Generation Storage

Increased IOPS - Greater Bandwidth - Consistent Low Latency

Spear Capabilities

Intelligent Parallel IO Processing

I/O requests are distributed across the K2 storage cluster, smartly parallelizing all reads and writes over multiple K-nodes. This achieves low latency, shortening the average response time of I/O requests and increasing the rate of I/O request processing, which provides an advantage over other arrays: it does not lose the ability to sustain high throughput.

Automated Data Distribution

K2 SPEAR automatically senses the capacity available both in the I/O and storage of the distributed storage K-Blocks. SPEAR optimizes data distribution by automatically and randomly allocating data over that capacity. The result is an ultra efficient use of the available resources that speeds processing and eliminates hot spots.

Dataprotect Self-Healing High Availability and Fast Data Protection

SPEAR is designed to maintain data availability through any type of failure. N+1 availability is built in to the hardware, but it is the SPEAR Storage OS with DataProtect that detects the failures, initiates the self-healing process and manages the dynamic cluster reconfiguration in the event of a failure. DataProtect assures self-healing high availability and fast, high-volume data protection for backup and disaster recovery, while delivering extreme storage performance to mission-critical applications.

Enhanced Flash Endurance

SPEAR minimizes writes to the Flash media and maximizes Flash endurance. It utilizes a system-wide write cache that eliminates hotspots and it distributes writes across all Flash media in the system, thus sustaining global wear leveling. With SPEAR’s abilities, Kaminario has a warranty of seven years for Flash endurance.

Non Disruptive Upgrades (NDU)

SPEAR facilitates code upgrades to its OS, including upgrades of BIOS, firmware and patches to any of the Kaminario K2 components. The upgrade process occurs while the system is online, with little to no impact on performance.

Kaminario Management Services (KMS)

SPEAR provides a single management service across all K-blocks in the K2 system. The KMS controls the K2 system, orchestrating and monitoring various system-wide tasks. The process is highly available at all times and automatically reconfigures itself as the system scales in order to manage the growing configurations.

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BEST-IN-CLASS

Performance, Consistency, & Resiliency

- Taneja Group

Independent analyst, The Taneja Group reviewed the 4th generation Kaminario K2 all-flash array examining its performance, scalability, storage capabilities and resiliency in databases and virtualized environments.

After hands-on testing, the report found that Kaminario held up to its promises around blistering performance across mixed workloads, in addition to providing ready-for-enterprise features on top of the most sophisticated resiliency approaches on the market.

The Taneja Group tested VMware Integration and Kaminario snapshots in addition to performance in mixed workloads and resiliency. The Taneja Group’s test environment used a 24TB capacity K2 all-flash system. All testing was performed in a virtualized test cluster running VMware ESXi 5.1.

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Spear Architecture

George Crump with Storage Switzerland talks about the importance of a scale-out architecture when buying all-flash storage.

3D Performance Consistency

Karminario’s K2 solution is 3-5 times faster than our closest competitor. We have been able to achieve performance of greater than 3 million IOPS and 56GB/s throughput on a single MLC-based all flash storage system.

Not only have we achieved leading performance for any enterprise storage system in the world, the performance is consistent and predictable for any mix of applications, workloads or use cases. This is critical for enterprise decision makers in planning and provisioning workloads. It also means that the Kaminario solution addresses all of the environments where storage performance is critical: OLTP, where latency is the big stumbling block; OLAP/DW, which demands high bandwidth; and virtualization, where IOPS is critical.

  • 3D Performance - Best Bandwidth, IOPS and Latency
  • Consistent Across Any Mixed Workloads
  • Unsurpassed for OLAP and OLTP workloads
  • Best in class for virtual environments
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Scalability

Kaminario K2 is built to scale both performance and capacity linearly. As performance or capacity requirements change within a given configuration, expansion is a hassle-free procedure. Additional nodes can be added, according to the required capacity and performance, all while keeping latency at a constant sub .3 ms level. K2 scales automatically to incorporate the new nodes and automatically redistributes a portion of the current data onto the new node, reating a well-balanced system. The scalable nature of K2 enables IT managers to consolidate applications such as databases onto a single K2 that normally would have been distributed across multiple servers.

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Resiliency

For most enterprise environments, resilience is more important than performance. No matter how fast your storage performs, if you don’t have access to it, the downtime is destructive to your business. At Kaminario, high availability, non-disruptive operations and data protection are the backbone of our SPEAR architecture.

K2 hardware components are all redundant and ensure no single point of failure. Its built-in fast and reliable failover and recovery capabilities protect applications and databases from experiencing a significant interruption in data access and there is less than 25% performance degradation in the event of any system failure. Guaranteed.

K2 is optimized for flash resiliency and endurance, and back it up with a 7 year warranty for our flash drives. Also when K2 software requires an upgrade, it is done in a nondisruptive manner. There will be no interruption in system availability.

All hardware components in K2 are hot-swappable. If there is any failure, K2’s self-healing will automatically notify the systems administrator, In the meantime, K2 automatically accesses data from the internal backup flash without impacting application or database performance.

  • No Single Point of Failure
  • Non-Disruptive Upgrades
  • Hot-Swappable Components
  • Automatic Self-Healing
  • Space-Efficient Snapshots
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Manageability

Kaminario’s K2 leverages its SPEAR architecture to provide administrators with a simple yet powerful, easy-to-use All-Flash Array, with best-in-breed, Enterprise-Class, management features.

With many other all-flash arrays, the cost of increased performance (vs. HDD-based storage) is a loss of important features – like redirect-on-write snapshots – or added complexity – like limited capacity and/or lack of automatic data distribution in case of expansion, need for performance tuning or manual optimization, etc.

With Kaminario, however, you need not make any of those compromises. You get:

  • Easy capacity management with automatic data distribution
  • No need for performance tuning or manual optimization
  • Easy day-to-day operations, and with nondisruptive code upgrades and service
  • Easy snapshots, with tight integration with Oracle and SQL
  • Single GUI management for all array sizes
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Features Flash Arrays Kaminario K2
Performance / Capacity Scaling Scale-up or limited Scale-Out True Scale-Out
Performance
  • Inconsistent under load
  • Inconsistent as array fills up
  • Bandwidth and IOPS do not scale linearly with array capacity
  • Consistent Performance, with high IOPS and Bandwidth but low latency
  • Linear performance growth
Workload Profiles Limited range / purpose built for a specific workload
  • Optimized to handle any type of workload - OLTP, OLAP, Virtualization
  • Will support all workloads in the same system with maximum performance
Endurance Typically 3 to 5 years of Flash Endurance warranty 7 years of Flash endurance warranty
Resiliency
  • Can only survive the loss of one component
  • Many lack rich snapshots and flexible recovery options
  • Will continue serving data, with unnoticeable performance loss, even if one whole node fails
  • High performance, space efficient, snapshots
  • Ability to restore to any snapshot without losing subsequent snapshots
Administration
  • Complex management that is rarely centralized (more storage means one more console)
  • Many lack RESTful APIs for extensibility and interoperability
  • Real Scale-Out means that more storage does not require more consoles
  • Rich CLI and GUI management options
  • RESTful APIs
K2 Demo

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White Paper

Kaminario K2 Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR)

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Mixed Workloads: The Real Killer of Application Performance

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Our Customers: A Love Story

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Allant Group Speeds Big Data Analytics by 16x

The Allant Group provides customers data warehousing and big data business intelligence analytics to better understand the results of their marketing and advertising campaigns by collecting audience interaction data from a variety of channels, such as television, direct mail, email, and digital channels.

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Conatus Capital Management Increases Performance and Resiliency in a Virtualized Environment

Conatus Capital Management LP is an investment advisory firm founded in 2007 and based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Conatus invests in publicly traded equities in all sectors of the economy in the United States and internationally. Stock selection is based on bottom-up, in-depth, fundamental analysis.

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Distributed Systems Solutions Doubles Its Big Data Analytics Application Throughput with Kaminario K2

Distributed Systems Solutions, Inc. (DSSI) case study, with Kaminario’s K2 all Flash SSD array, demonstrates how DSSI doubled its big data analytics application throughput and increased high availablity and data protection.

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TestAmerica Improves Testing Application Performance by 50%-75%

TestAmerica, the leader in environmental testing, providing analyses of ground water, air emissions and indoor air quality to businesses and consumers, saw a 50% improvement in the batch processing time and a 75% improvement in the response time for retrieving customer data when using the Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN.

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PetMed Express Recovers from Slow Storage Performance with a 400% Improvement

The following case study demonstrates how PetMed Express, America’s leading online pet pharmacy, used the Kaminario K2 all solid-state SAN storage to accelerate its operational processes and daily reporting. After installing the K2, PetMed Express saw a 400 percent performance improvement in its report processing and operational processes.

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Managed Health Care Associates Increases Microsoft SQL Server Database Performance 72% with the Kaminario K2

Kaminario’s K2 boosted MHA’s SQL Server database performance by 72% and enabled them to consolidate its business intelligence data warehouse and other databases from multiple servers to a single Kaminario K2.

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Leumi Accelerates Performance of Critical Banking Applications with Kaminario K2

Kaminario’s K2 accelerated Leumi Bank’s batch processing updating performance by up to 11 times, enabling the entire data update process to be five times faster than the original run time.

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Kaminario K2 Accelerates Critical SAP ERP Processes in the Israel Electric Company Up to 10 Times

The Israel Electric Company generates, transmits and distributes electricity to 2.5 million customers from the business, public and private sectors, and employs 12,500 people. The “Ma’or” project — for applying and implementing SAP’s ERP system throughout the company — is one of the largest and most comprehensive projects undertaken by the Electric Company in recent years.

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Kaminario Cuts Digital Trowel Web Mining Process by More than 50%

Digital Trowel, a leading corporation in Web-based data mining collects, distills and disseminates data from the Internet to provide the knowledge needed to enable its customers to make smart business decisions. Kaminario enabled them to reduce their data mining processes and data delivery by more than 50 percent.

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Whether you are running Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, IBM DB2 or MySQL, if those database applications are trying to access data from slow storage, you will see the negative effects of high I/O wait times on your database performance. We’ll provide you with an executive summary of our findings.

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