Kaminario K2 [EOL] Reviews

The functionality is very good.

It provides a full feature set without separate licensing (deduplication, compression, snapshot, asynchronous replication, stable performance, etc.).

I would like them to come down in price. It is as expensive as EMC, Hitachi, and other major vendors.

I would like them to improve the look of the product’s external casing and shelves.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I would rate technical support with an 8 out of 10.

The software part of the installation was easy. The hardware piece was more complex due to a lot of cables.

We evaluated Violin Memory, Hitachi, Pure Storage, EMC, and XtremIO.

This solution is very easy to use and helped me technically.

Provisioning large numbers of virtual desktops has sped up considerably. This helps to push out necessary updates on our virtual desktops. Turning on desktop refresh after logoff becomes more viable on a larger scale.

The most valuable aspect is the use of solid-state storage drives instead of spinning drives. As solid-state drives' price per gigabyte narrows with spinning drives, it seems to make sense to move to the solid-state technology.

The management graphical interface needs more improvement.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate technical support as 3/5.

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

Initial setup was very straightforward. Kaminario sent a technician to set up the array. It took the technician about 2-3 hours.

All features are provided in the licensing. The cost of Kaminario was less than the cost of a hybrid array.

We evaluated 3PAR, Compellent, Nimble, Pure Storage and Dell EMC.

Compare the hardware technology of competing solutions and features against the all flash Kaminario with the cost.

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.

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.

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.

The most valuable feature is definitely the always-on data deduplication.

On the road map, I'm hoping to see Active Directory integration. Right now, you still have to use a local admin account to log in and manage everything. That's really the only downfall as of the moment. I'd like to be able to have all of my Active Directory users support this infrastructure and be able to audit who logged in and did what. Right now, it's limited to local account access, so AD integration has to happen.

It is consistently stable; haven't had a single issue with it. We performed a live firmware upgrade during production, 9 AM Monday morning, failed everything over from one control to the next. Nobody even noticed.

It is going to meet our scalability needs. With the K-block architecture, we have the ability to expand two more full shelves if we need to. We got the dual controllers; a single shelf now with 20 TB raw in each location, and we're getting about 65 TB out of the array. It's amazing.

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.

I definitely recommend giving it a shot. Kaminario will let you try it for free. They'll let you run your production workload on it. They pretty much hold your hand the whole way. There's nothing really bad that could happen that I could see. The dashboard's too easy. The engineering team is too easy.

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.

The K2 has basically removed storage as a bottleneck in our datacenter. Everything comes off the K2 at sub-millisecond speed.

Speed and ease of use. The system is very quick to get installed and up and running. The GUI is very straightforward and easy to use. Performance is exceptional.

There are a few areas where the system could be improved. Examples would be that the system currently has a 15TB LUN size limit and that snapshots need to be scheduled through script API instead of the GUI. These are items that will be addressed in future firmware releases.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

We haven't needed to scale it yet.

Have not had any components fail yet. Customer service emails me when they have new firmware and they upgrade it for me.

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

Deployment time from the box to LUNs presented to VMware was four hours.

We are a Kaminario VAR but Kaminario still did the implementation.

Kaminario is very competitive on price. They also have a pay per TB model.

As with any all flash array, deduplication and compression rates are important factors in calculating usable capacity. A dedupe assessment will help a lot.