Kaminario's K2, based on commodity servers has best SPC-1 storage benchmark result

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/18/kaminario_k2_flashes_spc1_rankings/
http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1/#spc1
http://www.storageperformance.org/benchmark_results_files/SPC-1/Kaminario/A00137_Kaminario_K2/a00137_Kaminario_K2-K2F00000700_SPC-1_executive-summary.pdf


The fastest storage vendor according to the Storage Performance Council SPC-1 benchmark is Kaminario's K2 flash array. The K2 architecture is a scale-out configuration, the benchmark used 28  K-Nodes (commodity Intel servers), each with eight 800GB SSDs inside them; a usable space total of 60.13TB, 30.6 per cent of the total capacity, 196.5TB.

The K2  scored 1,239,8998  SPC-1 IOPS  at $0.80/SPC-1. 

Top SPC-1 benchmark results:

Kaminario's K2 is named after the killer mountain, Kaminario was established in 2008 by Dani Golan a former EMC executive with an Israel-based R&D division, The K2 systems are built using a RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) model. Each node uses low cost Intel based server with open source operating system and their own whizz-bang special sauce software they call SPEAR.

This brings me to my real point....the traditional storage vendors such as EMC, IBM, HDS, Netapp or HP have billion dollar budgets, yet a small startup using commodity servers and commodity flash storage with some very clever software can offer much higher performance at a small fraction of the cost.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that building a high-performance storage system required custom silicon. EMC’s vMAX, HDS’s VSP, BlueArc’s Titan and HP’s 3Par systems are all crammed full of custom chips. However, with commodity Intel/AMD boosting the performance of x86 processors and flash storage, some industry observers have suggested that the days of custom hardware are numbered. 

Many storage vendors now use the off-the-shelf approach, turning commodity servers into into a fire-breathing solid-state storage systems. The servers are low cost, yet very powerful Intel servers which are blazingly fast, very capacious, have big pipes, amazingly dense, built for availability and monitoring.

Examples of storage vendors that use commodity Intel/AMD servers with open source UNIX based operating system as the foundation of their storage include::

• Netapp based on BSD Net/2, later FreeBSD
• IBM XIV based on Linux
• EMC Isilon based on FreeBSD
• IBM SVC based on Linux
• Oracle ZFS Appliance based on Solaris x86
• Most flash storage startups are also based on Linux/FreeBSD

Of course other than commodity servers and open source operating system they all have their own special sauce that is propitiatory.software. This software differentiates the vendors, and enabled them to have huge profit margins, yet as more and more workloads move to virtual servers the virtualisation layer can handle many of the smarts that were only available with expensive Tier 1 storage such as:

• highly availability
• intelligent caching
• snapshots

• remote replication
• deduplication
• migrate storage between different storage tiers
• migrate storage between arrays
• migrate storage across entire systems with zero downtime

The virtualisation layer eliminates the need for expensive tier 1 storage. It is only a matter of time before an open source project or virtualisation layer is released that provides robust and scalable stack for private/public cloud storage at low cost.

VMware;s Chuck Hollis suggest that storage will become part of the virtualisation layer a la vSphere VSAN:
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2013/08/why-you-should-consider-vmware-as-a-serious-future-storage-vendor.html

Hard to believe that storage will become commoditised? All we have to do is to recall what happened to compute and operating systems, in the last 20 years compute platform has moved to commodity servers. Compute platform no longer requires propitiatory operating system on very expensive hardware. Low cost Intel/AMD servers now have huge performance and can be used with (almost) free Linux operating system. The low cost commodity compute platform is amazingly fast, scalable and very robust. Unless there are legacy application in play there is simply no need for expensive, proprietary compute platforms. 

If compute platform can move to low cost commodity infrastructure so can storage....just a matter of time.

For more information see articles below:
http://www.informationweek.com/storage/virtualization/how-to-break-free-from-tier-1-san-vendor/228000296
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047644/vmwares-virtualization-quest-could-help-shake-up-storage-too.html