We used to be an EMC end-to-end solution utilizing VNXs and VMAX.

The solutions were very expensive, hard to maintain (not flexible), and the bottom line is that it didn't provide the required service causing many production issues, not holding the needed load.

I didn't use a different solution in this installation, but did previous deployments with NetApp, EMC, EquaLogic and the Dell MD family. Kaminario presents a more feature-rich experience, with a highly compelling performance factor.

We do sell multiple products. But when Kaminario was brought to our attention, it became the core focus for most of our customers. There are some mid-market SMB customers that it may not fit the best for from a pricing perspective, but for the vast majority of our customers, once we aware of it and learned about the technology which it performed with, it fits a very useful metric.

We have used several different storage solutions. We like the K2 because of its speed and simplicity.

We used both EMC Clarion and Dell Compellent. We wanted a solid-state solution, better software management capabilities, and to future-proof costs.

We previously were using EMC CLARiiON and Dell Compellent. We switched to take advantage of all solid-state technology.

We needed to get off our old VNX, so we did a test pilot against Kaminario, Pure Storage, and Nimble Storage. We got a device and racked them all together in the data center and for 90 days, we shifted application workloads from each array and did performance benchmark testing. Kaminario won. Putting those spreadsheets side by side, Kaminario came on top. Nimble was just gone; they just couldn't perform compared to Pure and Kaminario.

For the second half of the POC, it was down to Kaminario and Pure. It was head to head. It really was, but Kaminario gave us a better dedupe rate on our mixed workload, including SQL back end infrastructure, so we went ahead and went with Kaminario.

I have to add also that Kaminario's engineering team is customer oriented all the way. Pure Storage had more of an attitude that they’re the best, and they brought that attitude with them and treated us more like a customer instead of a partner. That's where Kaminario really shines.

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.

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.

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

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

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.