Kaminario Introduces DataProtect

Kaminario, Inc., provider of performance all solid-state flash and DRAM SAN storage solutions, announced DataProtect, next generation of enterprise high availability and data protection for its K2 line of all solid-state SAN storage.

          Scale-Out Performance Architecture (SPEAR)

With DataProtect, the Kaminario K2 features end-to-end, self-healing high availability and fast, high-volume data protection while delivering performance.
 
Today’s mission-critical data requires more than just fast media – it requires enterprise data protection. The K2 is an all SSD SAN to offer enterprise high availability and data protection within a single system. In addition to N+1 redundancy and automatic failover, the K2 now offers hot-swappable components for fast and nondisruptive operations.

The K2’s data protection features include:

• Striping and mirroring through Kaminario’s RAID 10HD (hybrid distributed) capabilities. Data is automatically striped and mirrored across multiple DataNodes, primary storage in flash and DRAM SSD, and backup storage in flash, providing end-to-end performance availability and integrity at lower cost.
• Nondisruptive operations that provide for the automatic reconfiguration of a running system in the event of a failure. The K2 N+1 architecture has redundant critical components. In addition, it is self-healing around failures with hot-swappable modules. During a failure, the system continues to function, phones home and populates a spare node to replace the failed one automatically.
• High-volume snapshots for faster, more frequent backups. Snapshots can be taken in just milliseconds, 20 times faster than legacy SANs on the market today. In addition, the K2 supports more than 8,000 snapshots systemwide, double what is possible on most other systems. It uses redirect-on-write instead of copy-on-write for faster performance, and thin provisioning for a higher volume of snapshots. Kaminario snapshots do not impact production performance.
• Fast, asynchronous replication for performance disaster recovery and remote backup, delivering an RPO of less than 15 seconds.

"SSD storage media runs very fast – at microseconds of latency – therefore, the challenge for businesses is how to protect mission-critical applications at these speeds," said Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario. "With DataProtect, we have created an innovative storage software stack specifically to protect data on fast SSD media. Kaminario is leading the market by ensuring complete high availability and data protection for very fast storage, enabling businesses to trust their mission-critical applications to all-SSD-based storage."

"Our GPFS metadata – essentially a database that stores the locations and attributes of all files – is of critical importance and must be stored on the highest performance and most reliable storage available," said Vijay K. Agarwala, senior director, research computing and cyberinfrastructure, Pennsylvania State University. "Not only does Kaminario deliver the speed we require, but it does so with enterprise high availability."
 
"Higher speed solid-state storage brings about new concerns around protecting and making available large volumes of data, especially given the reliability issues associated with SSD media," said Benjamin Woo, program vice president, Worldwide storage Systems, IDC. "Kaminario has built an SSD SAN storage system with high availability and data protection specifically designed for the high speeds and volumes of SSD-based storage. In addition, they offer the cost-effective flexibility to mix Flash and DRAM in a single system, allowing companies to realize the best price/performance for their mission-critical application environments."

"ESG research shows that of all the reasons IT organizations purchase solid-state storage, performance is number one, but reliability comes in as a strong second. Therefore, if you are looking to purchase a high performance SSD-based SAN, then it had better be a proven and highly reliable one," said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). "Not only has the Kaminario K2 proven its high availability capabilities in ESG’s Lab Validation tests (despite induced failures, application workloads continued without interruption), but also the company has now announced DataProtect and taken its data reliability to an even higher level."
 
"Data replication and snapshots, along with self-healing high availability, are essential capabilities for enterprise-grade SSD storage," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "Kaminario offers unique high availability features such as N+1 hardware redundancy, which is not seen elsewhere, and has proven non-disruptive operations. By wrapping comprehensive data protection around its high availability, Kaminario meets enterprise market demand for high performance storage that is just perfect for mission critical applications."
 
The K2’s Scale-out Performance storage Architecture (SPEAR) has a granular scale-out cluster design that combines blade servers, SSD (flash and DRAM) media and the SPEAR storage Operating System (OS) to create a fast, highly available and shared storage appliance. DataProtect is the intelligence within the SPEAR storage OS for delivering a reliable self-healing high availability and fast, high-volume data protection. The K2 is the first all solid-state SAN storage solution that allows to choose DRAM and/or Flash media to accommodate the storage performance needs of diverse applications, workloads and budgets and deliver the reliability that enterprises demand.
 
The K2’s ability to offer freedom of choice in SSD media, deliver linear scalability of data capacity and performance, and provide full high availability and data protection makes it a solution for the extreme performance demands of database, virtualization, cloud and high performance computing environments.
 
Availability and pricing
All K2 DataProtect high availability and data protection features are available with the exception of array-based replication, which will be available in the second half of 2012. Host-based replication is available. Pricing starts at $20/GB for the K2-F flash-based array bundled with the DataProtect features.