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Blog List / Kaminario and Intel® – the Perfect Combination
15 Aug 2016

Kaminario and Intel® – the Perfect Combination

By Mike Jochimsen, Director of Alliances at Kaminario

The Kaminario K2 all-flash storage array (AFA) is a perfect example of a storage solution designed to take advantage of advances in technology including Intel’s new processors. Kaminario’s approach is, and always has been, to apply software defined architecture with a tightly coupled industry standard hardware stack.

We believe in helping customers be successful in today’s digital era. We provide them with a simple and cost efficient solution that combine the agility of a software approach with some degree of control on the hardware on which that software runs. We have always run our software on top of off the shelf industry standard hardware, massively produced, and based on the IA based platform.

This solution, combined with our recently announced K-Assured business assurance program, allows us to rapidly adopt new technologies in a very efficient and economical way. This works well for advances in the Intel® processor family as well as emerging technologies, such as Non-Volatile Memory Express* (NVMe*) and 3D XPointTM technology.

Modern CPUs, such as the Intel® Xeon® processor family, provide high performance for:

  • Compression

  • Deduplication

  • RAID encoding

  • High availability related tasks


Some of the technologies which make that possible:

  • Vectorization using single instruction and Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which allows for the parallelization of compute and is used by the K2 for RAID encoding.

  • QuickAssist Technology (QAT) compression acceleration capabilities used to improve performance and efficiency across the data center.

  • Multiple cores for running multiple operations in parallel allows us to leverage the SSD capabilities of handling multiple I/Os in parallel. This is further emphasized since we have multiple SSDs per server.


NVMe is an advancement in flash technology with great promise. The protocol is more efficient than SCSI since SCSI is a protocol developed for spinning disk drives, while NVMe is developed for flash. If you compare a single SSD drive with an NVMe card, the NVMe is without a doubt much faster. But when you aggregate 10s of NVMe cards under a single controller the difference is not as pronounced, since the bottleneck then will be the CPU of the controller and not the SAS performance. Therefore, if you replace all the drives within your storage solution today with NVMe cards without optimizing the other aspects of your hardware, such as controllers, CPU, and backend networking, you will likely spend lots of money without getting the real value that NVMe can deliver.

3D XPoint is another great example of an emerging technology with promise to advance NVM storage. This new technology will be tens of times faster than flash, but with lower density than flash at a higher price point. There is no doubt that storage solutions will integrate 3D XPoint, but is not as simple as replacing your current SSDs with it. In order to optimize the use of 3D XPoint, tightly controlled hardware configurations must be architected to take advantage of the 3D XPoint performance characteristics and density patterns.

Kaminario’s innovative architecture was designed to rapidly adopt and deploy these new technologies. The fact that the architecture runs on industry standard hardware is critical to this rapid deployment capability. Coupled with the recently introduced K-Assured business assurance program, Kaminario can ensure our customers that they will have the high standards of quality assurance delivered with pre-defined hardware appliances. And thus the flexibility to deploy new technologies quickly, which is so often associated with the pure software defined storage solutions on the market.
nvme idf16 intel-xeon kaminario-k2
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