Israeli storage vendor Kaminario has introduced a new generation of all-flash storage arrays, offering expanded capacity, new CPU cores and considerably improved data compression algorithms.

The sixth generation of arrays codenamed ‘K2’ can scale to several Petabytes of effective capacity, with a 5x improvement in compression over the previous generation systems.

“The combination of increasing performance and capacity efficiency, with the ability to seamlessly scale-out from previous generations of K2, give our customers the agility they need to compete in the modern, always-on world,” said Dani Golan, founder and CEO of Kaminario.

The announcement follows a $75 million investment into Kaminario, in a funding round led by Waterwood and CIRTech.

Fewer boxes, more flash

K2 Gen6
K2 Gen6 – Kaminario

The sixth generation of K2 arrays was designed for the needs of private cloud operators and organizations that want to offer flash infrastructure as a service.

The arrays are comprised of modular K-Blocks, each including an active-active controller pair and up to four drive shelves, containing up to 24 SSDs or 96TB each. This gives a single Gen6 K-Block the potential to store up to a petabyte of data after applying compression and deduplication algorithms – that’s five times more ‘effective capacity’ per system than a fifth generation K-Block.

The Gen6 arrays have also swapped their CPUs for new Broadwell silicon, resulting in a 2x processing performance increase.

Kaminario guarantees that its systems can achieve at least 4:1 data reduction – if the customer can’t hit this ratio during the lifecycle of the array, the company will provides additional capacity at no extra charge.

K2 is powered by Kaminario’s VisionOS, a software-defined storage platform that can make cheaper TLC flash more resilient, and enables customers to scale performance and capacity independently.

Thanks to backwards compatibility, Kaminario customers will be able to add Gen6 modules to existing Gen5 implementations non-disruptively. And in the future, the arrays could be updated with Storage Class Memory - Gen6 controllers offer front-loading, hot-swappable PCIe and NVMe slots that could be filled with innovative takes on RAM, like Diablo’s Memory1 or Intel’s upcoming 3D Xpoint.

“Kaminario’s technology philosophy is to focus on software-defined innovation while working with leading technology providers to deliver the most capable all-flash array platform in the market,” said Doron Tal, chief architect at Kaminario.

“With hardware technologies like NVMe and NVMe Fabrics rapidly emerging, we will be positioned to lead the industry, introducing enterprise-ready solutions and leveraging the most modern hardware technologies available.”