Kaminario Unveils Its 6th Gen K2

by Adam Armstrong February 8, 2017

written by Adam Armstrong February 8, 2017

Today Kaminario announced the latest version (sixth generation or Gen6) of its all-flash array (AFA), K2. The company states that with this new array they will be able to deliver multi-petabyte scale storage with the performance one expects from AFA. The Gen6 K2 is powered by Kaminario’s VisionOS operating system, which in their words “optimizes best-of-breed commodity hardware resources.” The new K2 is designed to deliver applications on highly scalable private clouds or as-a-service infrastructures.

K2 can scale both out and up, meaning that users can add both performance (through the addition of CPU cores) and capacity. Along with this ability, the K2 Gen6 uses advanced compression technology to hit industry leading capacity and efficiency backed by Kaminario’s ForeSight Storage Assurance program (which includes assured capacity, performance, availability, scale, maintenance, and SSD life). Kaminario also includes the implementation of standard compression algorithms to optimize resources resulting in more than 25% improvement in overall data reduction. In fact, Kaminario guarantees a data reduction ratio of 4:1 and if customers don’t see it, the company will provide additional capacity at no extra charge.

To deliver on the multi-petabyte storage, Kaminario uses a combination of the data reduction listed above and an upgrade to its K2 hardware. The K2 is comprised of K-Blocks, modular blocks that contain an active-active controller pair and up to four drive shelves with each shelf holding up to 24 SSDs. The K2 uses 4TB 3D TLC drives that enable a single K-Block to scale up to an effective capacity of 1PB, five times the effective capacity of the Gen5 K-Block. The new K-Blocks use Intel Broadwell CPUs, doubling performance over the last generation. And users will be able to add Gen6 K-Blocks to existing Gen5 K2 AFAs non-disruptively.

The new K-Block configurations and performance include:

1 K-Block Configuration – 30TB to 1PB of effective capacity with 370K IOPS, 6.2GB/s of throughput and 0.35ms latency
2 K-Block Configuration – 60TB to 2PB of effective capacity with 740K IOPS, 12.4GB/s of throughput and 0.35ms latency
3 K-Block Configuration – 90TB to 3PB of effective capacity with 1.1M IOPS, 6GB/s of throughput and 0.35ms latency
4 K-Block Configuration – 120TB to 4PB of effective capacity with 1.5M IOPS, 25GB/s of throughput and 0.35ms latency

Kaminario uses VisionOS to power its Gen6 K2. VisionOS is Kaminario’s core software-defined architecture and framework. VisionOS helps deliver capabilities such as the ability to scale-up and scale-out, to deliver high performance in complex workload environments, to optimize the use of hardware resources, and to deliver industry leading capacity efficiency. This software-defined approach enables Kaminario to be future-proof, or Tomorrow-Ready as they call it, by including the following features:

FC Gen6 32Gbit-ready: K2 Gen6 uses 16Gbit Fibre Channel Gen6 adapters that can be upgraded to 32Gbit with a simple transceiver swap.
Storage Class Memory (SCM)-ready: K2 Gen6 controllers offer front-loading, hot-swappable PCIe and NVMe slots for SCM devices such as Intel 3D Xpoint.
NVDIMM-ready: VisionOS is built to leverage next-gen high performance innovative storage class memory modules like NVDIMM that can sustain power failures without losing data.

Availability

Kaminario K2 is available now.

Kaminario site

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