Kaminario Introduces DataProtect — the Next Generation of Enterprise High Availability and Data Protection for SSD Storage

Kaminario, a leading provider of high performance all solid-state Flash and DRAM SAN storage solutions, today announced DataProtect™, the next generation of enterprise high availability and data protection for its K2 line of all solid-state SAN storage. With DataProtect, the Kaminario K2 features industry-leading end-to-end, self-healing high availability and fast, high-volume data protection while delivering extreme performance.

Today’s mission-critical data requires more than just fast media — it requires enterprise-class data protection. The Kaminario K2 is the first all solid-state drive (SSD) SAN storage to offer full 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, easy, non-disruptive operations.

The Kaminario K2’s data protection features include:

• Striping and mirroring through Kaminario’s innovative 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 high performance data availability and data integrity at a much lower cost.
• Non-disruptive 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, the Kaminario K2 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. This failover and restore capability is the fastest in the market.
• Fast, high-volume snapshots for faster, more frequent backups and better test and development. Snapshots can be taken in just milliseconds, 20 times faster than any legacy SAN system on the market today. In addition, the K2 supports more than 8,000 snapshots systemwide, double what is possible on most other systems. Kaminario uses redirect-on-write instead of copy-on-write for faster performance, and the K2 uses thin provisioning for a higher volume of snapshots. Kaminario snapshots do not impact production performance.
• Fast, asynchronous replication for high performance disaster recovery and remote backup, delivering an RPO (recovery point objective) 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.”

Customer reaction

“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.”

Industry validation

Storage analysts validate that SSDs will become the storage media of choice over the course of this decade, as they provide the faster performance required by today’s applications and databases. Enterprise high availability and data protection features are critical for storage solutions to ensure data availability and integrity without compromising on that performance.

“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, International Data Corporation (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 Kaminario K2’s Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR) has a granular scale-out cluster design that combines best-of-breed blade servers, SSD (Flash and DRAM) media and the revolutionary SPEAR Storage Operating System (OS) to create a blazingly fast, highly available and easy-to-deploy shared storage appliance. DataProtect is the intelligence within the SPEAR Storage OS for delivering the most reliable self-healing high availability and fastest, high-volume data protection on the market today. The Kaminario K2 is the first all solid-state SAN storage solution that allows the freedom 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 Kaminario K2’s unique 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 the ideal solution for the extreme performance demands of database, virtualization, cloud and high performance computing environments.

Kaminario videos and white papers illustrate DataProtect features

Kaminario executives provide detail about the high availability and data protection features of the K2 all solid-state SAN in a series of videos and white papers focused on the following topics:

• Kaminario K2 DataProtect introduction
• High availability and failover
• RAID 10HD
• Snapshots and replication

To view the Kaminario videos, go to http://www.kaminario.com/Resources/Videos/.

To access the Kaminario white papers, go to http://www.kaminario.com/Resources/White-Papers/

Availability and pricing

All Kaminario K2 DataProtect high availability and data protection features are available now with the exception of array-based replication, which will be available in the second half of 2012. Host-based replication is available now. Pricing starts at $20/GB for the K2-F Flash-based array bundled with the DataProtect features.

About Kaminario

Founded by storage experts from EMC, NetApp and IBM, Kaminario is leading the Flash and DRAM SSD revolution in high performance SAN storage. The Kaminario K2 family of all solid-state SAN storage eliminates I/O bottlenecks and dramatically reduces latency to accelerate critical business applications at a significantly lower cost and with a smaller footprint than legacy SAN storage. The Kaminario K2 is the first enterprise-grade SAN storage built from the ground up to take full advantage of modern Flash and DRAM SSD performance. With built-in self-healing high availability and data protection, a modular scale-out architecture, open X86 components, and media freedom of choice, the K2 consistently delivers ultralow latency, tens of GB/s of throughput and millions of IOPS. Kaminario is a fundamentally new and better way to store and retrieve performance-sensitive data. Kaminario is simply faster.

Located in Newton, Mass., Kaminario has built a global network of business partners, including Dell Inc. and Fusion-io, which market the K2 all solid-state SAN storage. For more information, visit www.kaminario.com.