Comments on: Room at the top

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:34:16 +0000

Arik,

Odd, that is what almost all of our clients are doing with our systems! Our RamSans look just like block level devices to the system, sound familiar? The more complex a solution, the more chances for failure.

By: Kaminario K2 for the IOPS-obsessed | Gathering Clouds

Kaminario K2 for the IOPS-obsessed | Gathering Clouds — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:52:57 +0000

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By: Arik Kol

Arik Kol — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:54:57 +0000

Mike,
You are comparing apples and oranges. Allow me to explain:
The Kaminario K2 appliance is a black box that utilizes blade server technology. Our operating system, kOS manages these different components under a single entity.
You just cannot compare the basic building blocks of the Kaminario K2 appliance (ioDirectors, Data nodes), managed by a single OS (the kOS) and running as a single system, with integrating several DIFFERENT TMS appliances to work together and expecting the customer to build a high availability solution on top of it.

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:08:54 +0000

Oh, and just to clarify, we have redundant controllers built in to each RamSan. Given that the minimum configuration for the K2 is 2 heads and 4 storage nodes the redundancy is from multiple components and not at the component level. With 4 RamSan440 or RamSan630 components you get multiple controllers, multiple back planes, and even at a RAID1 higher capacity (1 Terabyte or 20 terabytes, and 4, 8, 12 or 16 terabytes in between) and IOPS at lower latency than the K2 provides, in 12u of space.

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:49:40 +0000

For a green field install I can see your solution being useful. For existing SAN users I am not so sure as they will already have redundancy. The only single point of failure on the RamSans is the backplane. We always suggest using a RAID1 to a second RamSan to eliminate this single point of failure. We utilize RAID at the chip level, ECC and Chipkill as well as hot spare technologies. We are enterprise level and SAN ready.

By: Arik Kol

Arik Kol — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:55:04 +0000

Mike,
Seems like you did not fully understand my comment about the multiple controllers on high end storage solutions.
Please read the above description again. Unlike RamSan, there is no single point of failure in the K2 system, no chips, no motherboards – nothing – by design.
K2 consists of many data nodes and with complete balancing of the data. A node failure means reconstruction of a single digit perctage of the total capacity, no where near the 5TB you mention.

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:11:17 +0000

Oh, and by the way, if I have to rebuild 5 TB of DDR from disk storage, how long is that going to take? We use flash modules for backup of our high end RamSan440 so rebuilds are 10-20 times faster than from disk based backup technology. This also allows “instant on” at reduced performance during the rebuild.

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:17:53 +0000

Andrew, we at TMS (http://www.ramsan.com) have been optimizing SQL Server, Oracle, virtualization and any other IO intensive application for years. Check out our user stories and whitepapers.

Mike

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:14:57 +0000

All RamSan solutions (except for the PCIe RamSAn10/20) provide for multiple, multiport FC connections, some also allow IB. Rather than force users to use a controller of our choice we prefer to let them use one of their choice. This makes our solution more flexible and able to be easily upgraded as the users upgrade their systems.

By: Arik Kol

Arik Kol — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:29:14 +0000

Mike,
All high-end solutions in the data storage world contain at least two controllers. A point to think about when choosing an enterprise-grade solution…

By: Mike Ault

Mike Ault — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:03:39 +0000

But as an Enterprise DDR SSD offering it is still second or even third inline, not first. Maybe the storage heads and software deserve recognition, but not the SSD portion.

TMS RamSans are enterprise level storage and easy to manage. Give more IOPS and lower latency. They can be combined to scale to hundreds of terabytes if needed.

By: andrew flesch

andrew flesch — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:02:31 +0000

Great looking product. Having worked in the server based computing, virtualization and WAN optimization business for over ten years I have never found a good way to optimize and enhance I/O intensive applications like SQL and VDI(Virtual Desktops). I am assuming K 2 would speed up applications with intensive SQL backends and virtualized environments. Has Kaminario or Storage Mojo done any performance benchmarks on running virtualized workloads such as virtual hosted desktops? There are thousands of customers who could take advantage of this. Very exciting looking product with wide applicability.

By: tgs

tgs — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:39:58 +0000

too bad they used Dell blades.

By: Arik Kol

Arik Kol — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:38:53 +0000

Hi Kevin, Hi Mike,

There is a significant difference.

The new thing about Kaminario K2 is the unique combination of a true enterprise product, ease of use and hyper-performance as Robin articulated above. Kaminario’s secret sauce lies in its revolutionary OS which can benefit from any reliable fast media, combined with off-the-shelf hardware components.

Enterprise grade translates to high availability with no single point of failure and full redundancy of all the hardware components on a system level. It protects customer’s investment by enabling future growth of capacity and performance in the same system.

The capacity starts at 500GB and can grow up to 4TB per enclosure. A Kaminario K2 system can consist of multiple enclosures under a single management for aggregated performance and capacity. Upon hardware failure the system recovers automatically, allowing continued operation of the application.

As for performance, Kaminario K2 provides consistent millions of IOPS and tens of GB/s of throughput under both sequential and random workloads, eliminating the need to worry about either write performance or wear leveling.

In summary, the combination of Enterprise grade, scalable high performance and ease of use is what makes Kaminario K2 appealing to enterprise customers.

[Arik works for Kaminario]