Start-Up’s Profile: Kaminario

Name
Kaminario, Inc.

Location
HQ in Newton, MA; offices in San Francisco, CA, Chicago, IL, NYC, NY, Atlanta, GA, Seattle, WA, Los Angeles, CA; R&D in Haifa, Israel

Founded in
2008

Financial funding
Total raised at $75 million – including $25 million in 2012 (series D) and $15 million in 2011 (series C) – through A-D rounds with the following VCs participating: Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Mitsui.

Main executives

• Dani Golan, founder, CEO and chairman, previously served as president and GM of Performix Technologies, acquired by NICE Systems in 2006. Prior to that, he was an executive responsible for leading new ventures at EMC. Prior to his professional career, he served as a fighter pilot and an officer in the Israeli Air Force.
• Shachar Fienblit, VP engineering, held various leadership positions at IBM storage division, where he was responsible for architecture, definition, design and development of several enterprise storage products. He was an architect of copy functions for IBM’s DS family of storage products and the leading architect in IBM Haifa storage development lab.
• Doron Tal, chief architect, was at IBM Research Labs in Haifa where he conducted research in advanced document processing after working at Mellanox.
• Ritu Jyoti, VP product management, worked at EMC for 6 years, where she held positions across EMC NAS division, technology alliances and global solutions.
• Chris Lehman, VP sales, joins from XtremIO, acquired by EMC in 2012, where he was VP sales for the Americas. He formerly led sales growth at BlueArc, acquired by HDS.
• Phil Williams, VP business development, came from from Dell’s information data management group and was formerly VP of global business development and solutions marketing at NetApp.
• Dana Loof, VP marketing, notably guided Veritas Software for 4 years before Symantec acquisition, and eVault, Inc. for 3 years before Seagate acquisition.

Number of employees
~100

Technology
All-flash scale-out enterprise storage

Products
The K2 is an enterprise all-flash array, with MLC SAS SSDs apparently from Fusion-io, that reduces I/O bottlenecks and latency to accelerate applications at a lower cost and smaller footprint than legacy SAN and hybrid storage.

Based on Scale-out Performance and Resiliency Architecture (SPEAR), it provides consistent 3D performance, across any mixed workload and any mixed environment, while providing enterprise resiliency. The company claims more than 2.0 million IOmeter read IOPS, throughput up to 31GB/s read and 24.5GB/s write, latency up to 120μs. The product uses mirroring and striping for protection. Total capacity of K2 can reach 120TB. 4 to 40 8Gb FC and 4 to 40 iSCSI 10GbE ports are offered for connectivity. K2 Hybrid Array uses a mix of MLC flash and DRAM.

Released date
K2 generation 4 in April 2013

Price
At capacity on demand starting at $24,000 for 2TB

Roadmap
Entry into VDI

Technology partners
VMware, Oracle, Microsoft, Symantec, SAP, QLogic, ignite8 and Matrix.

Distributor
Synnex

Main customers
Test America, Conatus Capital, Allant XX, Distributed Systems Solutions, Inc., PetMed Express, MHA, Meadwestvaco, Kenshoo, IEC and RENCI

Applications
Oracle, VMware, SQL Server, Sybase, IBM DB2

Target market
Mid-size enterprises that require large data consumption, OLTP, OLAP, business intelligence, data warehousing, virtualized application environments like analytic/marketing, financial services, ad-tech companies, healthcare, scientific testing, retail, utilities, manufacturing, Internet.

Competitors
Legacy storage companies (EMC, NetApp, HP/3Par, IBM), Pure Storage, Violin Storage, Whiptail, etc