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Kaminario K2: The Truly Enterprise-Ready SSD Storage Array
Just a couple of years ago, as solid-state storage technologies began finding significant mainstream adoption, Taneja Group began closely following a vendor whose architectural roadmap seemed to destine them to be the pre-eminent architectural leader for scale-out, high performance, enterprise-ready, cost-effective solid-state arrays.
That vendor was Kaminario, who first entered the market with a highly resilient, scale-out architecture that promised extreme performance with more linear scalability as well as superior availability / serviceability versus other offerings we then saw on the market.
In the past couple of years, Kaminario has continued advancing their technology in both performance and features, systematically adding the mainstream features that the enterprise demands – and are that are too often missing on high performance storage systems: features like snapshots, utilization reporting, resiliency that tolerates full node failures, and more.
In turn, Kaminario recently drew the attention of Taneja Group Labs. Scale-out and enterprise-class storage management features are not easy to architect (especially not together), and we wanted to know whether Kaminario could deliver enterprise-class wrappings with all of their historic scale-out capabilities.
Extreme Applications in the Enterprise Drive Parallel File System Adoption
With the advent of big data and cloud-scale delivery, companies are racing to deploy cutting-edge services that include “extreme” applications like massive voice and image processing or complex fi-nancial analysis modeling that can push storage systems to their limits. Examples of some high visi-bility and big market impacting solutions include applications based on image pattern recognition at large scale and financial risk management based on decision-making at high speed.
These ground-breaking solutions, made up of very different activities but with similar data storage challenges, create incredible new lines of business representing significant revenue potential. Every day here at Taneja Group we see more and more mainstream enterprises exploring similar “extreme service” opportunities. But when enterprise IT data centers take stock of what it is required to host and deliver these new services, it quickly becomes apparent that traditional clustered and even scale-out file systems - of the kind that most enterprise data centers (or cloud providers) have racks and racks of - simply can’t handle the performance requirements.
There are already great enterprise storage solutions for applications that need either raw throughput, high capacity, parallel access, low latency, or high availability – maybe even for two or three of those at a time. But when an “extreme” application needs all of those requirements at the same time, only supercomputing type storage in the form of parallel file systems provides a functional solution. The problem is that most commercial enterprises simply can’t afford or risk basing a line of business on an expensive research project.
The good news is that some storage vendors have been industrializing former supercomputing storage technologies, hardening massively parallel file systems into commercially viable solutions. This opens the door for revolutionary services creation, enabling mainstream enterprise datacenters to support the exploitation of new extreme applications.
Are You Making Money With Your Object Storage?
Object storage has long been pigeon-holed as a necessary overhead expense for long-term archive storage, a data purgatory one step before tape or deletion. In our experience, we have seen many IT shops view object storage more as something exotic they have to implement to meet government regulations rather than as a competitive strategic asset that can help their businesses make money.
Normally when companies invest in high-end IT assets like enterprise-class storage, they hope to re-coup those investments in big ways like accelerating the performance of market competitive applica-tions or efficiently consolidating data centers. Maybe they are even starting to analyze big data to find better ways to run the business. There are far more opportunities to be sure, but these kinds of “money-making” initiatives have been mainly associated with “file” and “block” types of storage – the primary storage commonly used to power databases, host office productivity applications, and build pools of shared resources for virtualization projects. But that’s about to change. If you’ve intentionally dismissed or just over-looked object storage it is time to take deeper look. Today’s object storage provides brilliant capabilities for enhancing productivity, creating global platforms and developing new revenue streams.
Object storage has been evolving from its historical second tier data dumping ground into a value-building primary storage platform for content and collaboration. And the latest high performance cloud storage solutions could transform the whole nature of enterprise data storage. To really exploit this new generation of object storage, it is important to understand not only what it is and how it has evolved, but to start thinking about how to harness its emerging capabilities in building net new business.
Company Profile: Vembu Technologies
Since its founding in 2004, Vembu Technologies has maintained a two-fold mission: innovate cloud information management for business users and accelerate the growth of the channel partners who serve them.
Vembu StoreGrid is the flagship product that offers simplified, flexible and cost-effective data protection services in the cloud. Its innovative architecture enables integrated backup and recovery across multi-platform OS’s, physical and virtual environments, and multiple applications. Vembu SyncBlaze builds on these capabilities with a cloud file collaboration solution that solves the growing problem of file sharing in a mobile workforce.
Vembu completes its product portfolio with customized editions of StoreGrid and SyncBlaze for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Managed Hosting Providers (MHPs), Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Value Added Resellers (VARs). These specialized editions enable Vembu partners to offer multi-platform hybrid cloud data protection and content management to their SMB and mid-sized customers. Vembu’s customized support and business management offerings enable these partners to grow their customer base, increase revenues, and speed up go-to-market initiatives.