Kaminario Tweaks DRAM Storage Appliance

Storage startup Kaminario, which makes high-performance DRAM-based appliances for high-velocity business applications, on 28 March revealed that it is lowering the price and increasing the capacity for its K2 DRAM storage appliance.

Kaminario uses its home-developed, modular Scale-out Performance Architecture (SPEAR) inside its high-availability appliances. This enables flexible scaling of the K2’s performance and/or capacity, depending upon how the device is utilised, Gareth Taube, Kaminario’s vice president of marketing, told eWEEK.

Speedy throughput

An entry-level K2 system can be configured with 500GB of storage to deliver 150,000 IOPS (input/output per second) with 1.6GB/s throughput, Taube said. The modular-designed appliance, which simply plugs into a data centre rack, can scale up to a whopping 12TB and deliver an equally impressive 1.5 million IOPS with 16GB/s throughput, he said.

“What sets us apart is that our storage medium is all DRAM,” Taube told eWEEK. “And built into the appliance is high availability. There is no more dynamic data storage medium.

“The problem we are focused on is storage I/O performance. Eighty percent of the time, when we do an analysis of an application to find out what’s slowing it down, it’s disk I/O.”

Rarely does Kaminario find that an application is CPU-bound, Taube said. “We see this issue across the major industries that we’re selling into,” he said.

Financial services

Kaminario, based in Newton, Massachussetts, has identified its primary markets are financial services, telcos, web-based companies and government, Taube said.

The previous K2 was available in a 1TB configuration for $100,000 (£62,500), Taube said. Now, the K2 is available now at a 500TB starting point with an entry-level price of $50,000 and increased capacity that scales to 12TB, he said.