Kaminario K2 [EOL] Reviews

The solution has a very simple configuration. It has a good configuration, it's very simple. 

Access to technical support should be improved for our region. Technical support is good, but they're very hard to access.

When we have a problem with this storage, it's usually related to a very bad configuration. 

All-Flash Storage is very, very expensive. They are important solutions so I don't really have any ideas about how to rectify this. 

The device could use better monitoring tools.

The stability of the solution is very good. They're very high-end devices.

It has the best technical support because technical support is very important for this country because their reference is very, very hard to access for this solution. Technical support is very good.

The implementation of the solution is very simple. You just need to create a LAN and mount the host.

We use the private cloud deployment model.

I would rate this solution seven out of ten. If you need about high IOM, I would advise that you buy this device. You need to ensure you really need it for your organization, however, as it is quite expensive. 

production real time environments in 3 data centers 

Miami, London and Frankfurt

About 4500 virtual machines

We used to be work with EMC solutions VNX and VMAX, which were very costly, hard to maintain, and no matter how many upgrades we did every year, it was always a bottleneck and the first place to look during an operational issue.

After we upgraded, I don't remember anyone in the company coming to check if the problem was with the storage and all the DB transactions that caused downtime in the past are now a daily event without anyone noticing.

• Inline deduplication
• Inline compression
• Scale in and out
• Easy operation
• Extremity low latency
• Stability

I can sleep at night.

The change resolved many coding issues that we had which required a long development process to resolve performance which become not critical - clearing time for new product features.

Dramatic operational relief.

Improved scale and budget planning with flexibility of the solution for budget needs and efficiency for growth with the great optimization ratio due to the nature of our use.

I didn't encounter any stability issues. It actually proved to be very stable and robust, even when one of our DC was suffering power issues due to a faulty UPS. After the power was unstable and the K2 nodes shut down using its own batteries. The reviving process was amazing as we were able to power up over 1000 VM servers with running service in less than two minutes. (The process that took two to three hours with the old storage solution.)

Scalability proved to be very easy as when we decided to add more capacity and more drawers. The process was seamless without any impact on the production traffic.

Customer Service:

Very high - boutique level with great personal responses and very quick solutions.

Technical Support:

Technical support was amazing as they went the extra mile to get us solutions for migration from complex issues that we had on our old systems, providing hardware, software, and ongoing support until process was completely satisfactory to us.

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.

The initial setup was complex as we install all our HW remotely and started a migration process from old system that needed additional HW and software provided by the Kaminario team with full support. it took two to three days until we were up and running on the new systems without any interruption to the production traffic

We implemented directly with Kaminario's tech team.

The level of expertise was very high.

We have had ROI in a few areas:

• With operational complexity reduced, operational incidents and troubleshooting don't exist anymore.
• Service benefit is a huge performance boost. Time to complete tasks have reduced dramatically, and now, we can complete all heavy tasks without any impact on the production traffic.
• Budget planning is very easy as we closed pricing ahead of all needed future upgrades, but we were surprised as the storage efficiency grows, we add more and more machines and we had savings that we didn't plan on.

The Kaminario setup is simple and there are no hidden licensing fees so this area is a relief.

Yes, i have evaluated and tested both XtremIO and 3Par.

Other solutions were examined, but not tested (Pure, Nimble, IBM, and Hitachi).

3Par is technologically behind, while XtremIO was good but missing only a few areas that affect the efficiency and budget.

I started with Kaminario searching for one solution for all our services from the perspective of looking forward to the best of bread, which will support our huge planned growth, allowing both technical and budget to co-exist peacefully. From my perspective, it is a huge success fulfilling everything we needed and more!

• Scale out: Scale out is a differentiator for them, especially in the enterprise market. It's key for a lot of customers.
• There's no forced forklift upgrades. The customer that has a first generation of the product or later of the product knows that they will all work together harmoniously.
• The data round is not a big deal. There's no hard down points to this stuff, which can be a big differentiator.
• Adaptive block size is another differentiator. A lot of customers nowadays commoditize their storage. They want it as easy and simple as possible. A lot of storage rates out there, they do different block sizes very well. Where they can change block sizes, or set certain block sizes. You don't worry about any of that with Kaminario. The adaptive block size just moves it around, gets it all figured out, and does it. Where I see this working well with a lot of customers, are those who want something extremely simple, performant, and scalable.

It's very hard to tell what else is super important to customers. Besides, maybe it's obvious stuff like the maintenance program. They have a great maintenance program and as the systems go up, year over year, it stays the same. It can go down, but won't go up, year over year. So coupled with the simplicity, performance, and just absolute ease of use of the management of it, I don't know why anyone wouldn't buy it. I'm kind of confused why people don't buy it, actually. I know there's a lot of political talk where people will buy, an EMC, HP, or IBM. These guys have got some of the best venture capitalists behind them and they've got some of the best numbers quarter over quarter. Otherwise, I don't know why people wouldn't want to even look at this product.

They might not like me saying this, but I would love to see capacity on its DRAM. I know it's not cost effective for them to do it, but I think that it could be a big differentiator and was a big differentiator from the beginning. It might make the reseller's jobs easier. Not having to wait for something; just give them the quote for the amount of time, they can have as much as they want. That message resonated very well with customers, as you can imagine, so I wish that came back. I understand why it's not there, financially it doesn't make sense, but I wish it were still around.

I wish they had more ISP or certified partnerships with specific use cases. For instance, epic and health care would be a huge use case that I know they're working on. But there's a few of those, like epic and health care where it might not matter if it's the best technology, the best people, or the best support system. If it's not on a specific list or a conference level, I think if they worked hard at what they're doing at getting these ISPs and specific application awarenesses to these companies that it would be gold mine.

Stability has been great. We have a number of customers on it. We also run it internally in our managed service cloud. It's been spectacular: no issues. In fact, when we demo to our customers who are not going into our managed service environment, we show them how it's functioning in the cloud: our cloud. Then, we let them talk to the customers of ours that are using it, in our cloud. So we don't just rely on it for its reputation to customers, but we rely on it for its reputation for our managed service satchel cloud customers as well. We don't think of it as just a transaction, although it can be, we think of it as a long-term play for the viability of the company as a whole.

It's amazing. I think we're up to 16 nodes now that they can go out, on a scale out. I don't know the exact number on petabytes. But I don't know of anything else that, scale capacity and performance at the same time, at the level that Kaminario can do.

I personally have not used technical support. I have many customers who have used them, and who have had great experiences.

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.

I'm an account executive. So, I'm not smart enough to set one up. Although, they say I can because it's so simple, but I don't want to try. I'll leave that to the smart guys.

I think that the latest government reports are pretty telling. If you look at the latest government reports on how they're ranked in all the different categories, they pretty much blow them all away. The only things that they didn't blow away are the things I just talked about in the previous questions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Technology is probably number one. They've got to have great technology. They've got to have a great sales and engineering support staff to know that when we're putting our name behind it, that customers trust us. Our name's on it just as much as Kaminario's name is on it. So, we have to pick manufacturers or vendors whom we truly believe will be there from a technology standpoint but also from a business standpoint. Just a general hopefulness standpoint, that if we have an issue that's big or small, we know there's people at Kaminario who we can call, who care, and who will help. That means a lot to us.

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 speed is the most valuable feature; the speed and, for us in particular in what we're doing, the data de-duplication. We're using this for our continuous-build system. We just have a lot of the same systems that have the same information on them; while they get built, de-dup's huge.

We trialed POCs starting in November of last year (2015). We purchased in January of this year. We've been going now for nine months in production, and three months prior to that as a trial of the hardware.

It has been absolutely and consistently stable. I don't believe we've had any down time since installing it.

It will meet our needs going forward. We haven't scaled past a single unit yet, but based off of everything I hear, I can get another one and just plug it in the back and it scales as much as we want to do.

Technical support is absolutely great. We ran into an issue due to some improper network configuration on our side when we PoC'd it. We actually had an engineer come on line, write up a little bit of firmware to fix it in Kaminario, and push it out to our box, which allowed us to use our badly configured network at the time. It's been great.

The setup was extremely straightforward. A tech came out and racked the box, but we could have handled racking it as well. The tech came out, racked the box, plugged it in, and we were up and running in about 15 minutes.

We absolutely were considering other solutions at the time. We trialed a couple different options from EMC and NetApp.

If you’re looking for an all-flash-based solution, I would absolutely recommend a Kaminario K2 system.

• Ability to deploy large numbers of virtual desktops
• Enables quick updates to virtual desktops

We thought we could only afford a hybrid solutions.

Kaminario allowed us a solid state solution with marginal incremental cost.

More important was the software/logic of how Kaminario de-dups and manages the data sets.

• Solid-state storage drives
• Price per gigabyte
• Logic/software management

The interface look and feel could be improved.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 3/5. There have been some inconsistencies.

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

Initial setup was easy. The technical installation team for Kaminario was excellent.

The licensing is all-inclusive.

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

Spend time with the engineering staff to understand current and future offerings. I was impressed.

We no longer have to consider the performance penalties associated with different application profiles in our cloud stack. Having a high-performance SAN core gives us instant resources, with capacity on demand.

Standard-based monitoring means we aren't locked in to using platform-specific or proprietary tooling to track and monitor our device performance.

Built-in snapshot support gives us SAN-side functionality most other platforms would have had us license separately.

Unexpectedly high compression ratios give us more capacity for our investment; again without a nickel-and-dime licensing model.

Rocketing IOPS results in performance we don't have to fixate on. We can instead focus efforts on other layers in the stack, knowing that our SAN layer is lightning fast, with capacity to spare.

The front panel of the drive shelf doesn't always seat firmly. Aside from that, we haven't found any shortcomings in their platform to date.

The solution has behaved seamlessly since installation.

We haven’t had scalability issues.

We have not had cause to engage with their technical support.

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.

Setup was extremely straightforward. As opposed to other management interfaces, the Kaminario tooling is platform-agnostic, and provides a high degree of flexibility, without being complicated.

Consider the total investment in each suite being considered. The "extra" costs associated with features and options that are available off the shelf with Kaminario, make their value proposition extremely competitive.

In this case, we did not actively evaluate anything else. We had a very limited window in which to execute our implementation and the Kaminario team made that happen.

Make use of the team Kaminario provides in the sales and post-sales processes. They're an invaluable resource in streamlining a deployment.

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.

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.