Kaminario K2 [EOL] Reviews

Image backups of our production servers that used to take hours now take minutes. This has greatly increased performance of our database and business systems, and eliminated periods of sluggish performance.

The primary benefit is they actually guarantee performance and capacity. I don’t know of any other firm that backs this up with a commitment to add hardware until the performance guarantee is satisfied.

The increased performance is many times above our previous array performance in all metrics. Integration with vSphere features is also a definite plus.

They are continuing to improve the product and support new features in virtualization, including Vmware.

Not at all. It has run without incident since installation.

No. We remain in a position to be able to scale up & out as much as we will need in the conceivable future for our company.

The technical support from Kaminario during two recoveries from power outages has also been outstanding. In both cases they had checked in and made sure the hardware was in good working order before I had time to arrive on scene.

Yes, our legacy storage array was a traditional (hard drive) array that needed to be replaced due to age and lack of technological advancement by the vendor over the years.

Setup was very straightforward, well planned in advance by the installation team, and executed without incident & on time at the agreed installation date.

As with any hardware purchase, be clear with the vendors on what your expectations are and get their commitments in writing. There were other vendors that were not as willing to guarantee their product as Kaminario.

EMC, Compellent

Be sure to make a real cost comparison based on performance and ability; don’t just buy from someone because they’re the biggest company.

The biggest thing for us, second to the performance, is that we were looking for a solution that offers block-level deduplication. Right now, the capacity that we're saving by using Kaminario's K2 is giving us a four-to-one ratio for our deduplication. We're using it specifically and exclusively for block level; we probably have about 300 VMs just in our studio alone and of that, I believe that we probably have half of that or more running on the K2. It's saving us a lot of storage.

I would like to see LDAP for the management panel; I've been notified they might be currently working on it. That is probably the biggest feature that we wanted; otherwise, everything has been just a champion with it, we've been really happy with it.

It’s been extremely stable. The last time we brought Kaminario down was to do a firmware upgrade, so our uptime before that was months, and months, and months.

I believe it will scale to meet your company's needs going forward. I like the way that they have designed it to scale up and out. We're looking at eventually adding some more capacity to it, because I believe that we're using probably about 85% at the moment.

Support's amazing. When it came time for the flash upgrade, our rep contacted us, and put us in touch with their engineering team. I had a guy on the phone with a remote session, running through the firmware upgrade; everything went flawlessly. And it was a live upgrade too, we didn't even have to bring the array down.

The main reason we started using it was our continuous integration environment. We had a product before that was 15,000 RPM SAS spinning discs; build times were at about two hours. Our holdup was disk I/O, so we did a PoC with Kaminario and we reduced build times down to fifteen minutes for a full build from two hours. That was the best part about it.

When I decide to work with a vendor like Kaminario, I look for, honestly, cost effectiveness. I like the most bang for our buck. I definitely look at performance metrics. I'm not so much interested in whether they're a big power player like EMC or Dell or anything like that. To me, the truth is in the numbers.

As far as advice, I'd recommend, if they're looking for a flash-based solution for high throughput, low latency, and high IOPS, check out Kaminario's K2, because so far it's worked for us; we've provided a testimony for them. Honestly, for us to stretch ourselves out there and do that, it's been amazing for us.

For us, the valuable feature has really been the speed. We moved from a Fusion IO card right on the PCI bus. We moved a 2 TB one over, and we didn't lose any speed, no degradation; everything just ran great. That's been one of our biggest features.

Ease of use: My installers - my administrators over the system - they love how easy and fast it is to install and spin up a LUN and get going.

As of right now, I haven't done a whole lot of work on it. I would like to see them work with Cisco, so it comes off the FIs, instead of having to go through my 10-gig network. One extra hop is not a big deal, but it’d be a little bit faster if we can get it right to the back point of my FIs. I think that's the biggest feature I would like to see come down the line.

It has been one of the most stable solutions so far that I've seen. Obviously, we're 10 months into it. We have not had any problems with it.

When we've had minor issues, we've had calls with support and they were able to resolve them fast, easy. Everybody was straightforward. It's been a very transparent company with us, so we're very happy in that aspect.

Based on everything I have read and seen, it's a very scalable solution; it can scale out, scale up. That's one of the reasons we chose to go with it, because we felt like in the future we could move forward with it.

Support has been great. While I have never had to personally call, I've had my administrators call. Every time we called and had an issue, they are on it. They are fast. They are timely. They are clear and precise on their answers, and generally willing to help out. Sometimes when you call tech support, or a support company, you just don't get that feeling they want to be there. On the other hand, these guys are excited about the technology and want to help out.

Initial setup was really straight forward. It was very easy. They did send out two people including my sales engineer at the time to install it, but the install was great. They were very thorough. They walked my engineer through every last little step, what needed done. Ever since then, we've managed it ourselves.

Go with it. I tell people all the time they need to take a serious look at it. If they're looking for speed, reliability, and the deduplication that they'll be getting out of it, this is definitely a great product to look at.

My rating mainly reflects that I'm not using its full potential. I want to see what it can do. But it's up there. It's a really good product.

Performance.

Improved performance by more than 50x on our application.

Replication and de-duplication could be better.

1.5 yrs.

No issues with deployment.

One time, there was a node failure and host lost connectivity.

Yes, need to halt the system in order to scale it out (but I guess in the later version, they can scale on the fly - not sure).

Good Customer Service.

Good Technical Support.

No, no other flash solution, we moved from spinning disks to flash.

It was pretty much straightforward, vendor came in and installed the array.

We implemented thru a vendor team. The vendor team was knowledgeable.

Positive ROI.

Yes, we did POC with bunch of other Flash vendors and choose K2 over them.

If you are looking for a perf, K2 is the one. But it still lags behind the replication and de-duplication of other vendors.

Using snapshots allows us to automate production database refreshes to development environments in minutes, rather than in hours.

• Data reduction and snapshot abilities: Smaller footprint in the datacenter (lower cost for power, cooling, etc.).

A single pane of glass to monitor/manage multiple arrays would be helpful.

Having a single management console to monitor / manage multiple K2 arrays would make Kaminario even more efficient.  We have four arrays and each have to be monitored and managed individually.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Past solutions consisted of spinning disks without deduplication and compression. Database refreshes took much longer and required multiple clones.

Setting up the array was simple. The GUI is very intuitive and easy to maneuver.

Licensing is very straightforward. The cost was considerably lower than other products we looked at.

We evaluated Pure Storage and Dell EMC XtremIO.

This is a great product that is continually improving.

Latency is definitely the big key for us. Obviously all flash with the IOPS was also important, but I think latency was the bigger key to give us the performance that we wanted.

In terms of what we're looking for, I don’t see anything critical at the moment. Some of the nice to haves for us, in terms of today, would be VVols but again, it’s not a critical feature. We can continue to use what we use now.

I'd give it a perfect rating if I could push it to 300,000 IOPS like they promote; we just haven't been able to push that many IOPS out of our system.

It's been absolutely stable and consistent. We have not run into any issues at all. We try to push it. We can't push it as far as we need, I guess, or our applications can't push it. We know it's capable.

Scalability was one of the key factors for us on our purchase. We haven't needed to scale yet but in the future, if we do need to, it's certainly a consideration we're going to play a part in.

The couple of technical support calls we've made, they've been proactive, very good about that; so that's been good. I have no qualms about the support either.

Part of the reason my company started using it was that we had an older SAN that was going end of life, so we had to research and buy a new SAN to replace the SAN that was going end of life. The current marketplace was kind of in between hybrids and all flash, so we decided to go all flash. Kaminario came up in regard to the research.

Initial setup was straightforward; it was easy. The installer, the technician that came in, he was very straightforward and very easy going. It was incredibly fast compared to the past installs we've done before.

When we start working with a vendor like Kaminario, we look for longevity. We look for a company that has a good report. We look for compatibility with the software that we use. Those are big keys for us.

I think this product hits all the big features of all the SANs that are out there, all the storage vendors that are out there and more. In terms of performance, scalability, scaling out, scaling up, it's all there.

It has a very good duplication rate; very, very good. The ratio between the physical storage and the storage we use is very high. Good performance.

I think it should have better performance with small files. With big data, its performance is top notch, but it is difficult to load small files.

We had problems before. It crashed a couple of times, but we had good support from Kaminario. They gave us another storage app and we could replicate between the two, so if the crashes continued, we had another app. They fixed the crashing problem and since then, it's been okay.

I think it is scalable. You can buy another shelf any time you need one.

Technical support is very good. We had quick response for anything we needed.

Initial setup is straight forward; very simple, web administration.

It's a good solution. I think it’s a bit expensive. As a technical guy, I don't look at that side very much. It's a good solution overall.