Kaminario Automates Its All-Flash SAN with Machine Learning

The all-flash storage company Kaminario has extended functionality of its cloud-based predictive analytics platform Clarity.

"With powerful enhancements to Clarity," the company said, "Kaminario simplifies and automates storage management to help customers make the move towards self-driving data centers."

Clarity offers yet another dashboard-driven single pane of glass approach -- something of a holy grail these days -- that promises to make data center operations as easy as falling off a log with the help of AI and machine learning. According to the announcement, Clarity leverages big data analytics and predictive modeling to highlight actionable insights. The purpose? To simplify storage management and bring agility, as seen in today's hyper-scale environments, to enterprises and smaller cloud providers.

"Soon data centers will be self-driving and autonomous," Kaminario's CTO Eyal David said in a statement. "Our goal is to simplify and automate storage management and make it easy for our customers to get the most of their investment. With Clarity, we have laid the foundation for a powerful analytics and automation platform, and we are rolling out a release with new features focused on simplifying data center operations and supporting our customers’ cloud strategies."

Related:Comparing Top All-Flash Data Center Storage Arrays

If that sounds like just what the doctor ordered, you might want to pay attention to the words "our customers" before picking up the phone to make an inquiry. Unless you're running, or plan to run, the company's solid state flash memory SAN, Clarity is not for you. It's designed to be used specifically with Kaminario's K2 systems.

For those already running K2, however, Clarity looks to be a worthwhile add-on.

The platform works by collecting data from its installed base "to bring intelligent monitoring, visibility, and prescriptive support to data center management." Through its dashboard, it brings visibility across entire clusters of K2 systems to manage the unpredictable behavior of cloud-era applications.

Key new enhancements include:

Seamless Multi-System Management: A single dashboard to manage all Kaminario K2 systems deployed across any number of sites using fine-grained access controls

Predictive Capacity and Performance Monitoring: The ability to predict future capacity and performance utilization using machine learning based on usage patterns

Intelligent Service Groups: These allow customers to define and analyze groups of workloads drilled down to the customer, application or business unit level, letting users align storage infrastructure resources to business or application SLAs

Related:IBM’s Tape Breakthrough May Change Cold Storage – But Not Anytime Soon

Predictive Support: A new level of automated service is obtained through the combination of real-time events collected from call-home data and an always evolving rules engine that helps generate predictive alerts across a wide range of functions

Support Portal Integration: Kaminario’s Support Portal (now called Clarity Support) features single-sign-on integration with the Clarity Analytics environment. Users can now move seamlessly from the analytics environment to the support portal for easier case management.

"Having a single, unified dashboard to monitor all of our storage arrays is invaluable for capacity and performance trend analysis," Todd Carrier, an infrastructure database administrator at Clearwater Analytics said in a statement. "Kaminario Clarity gives us rich analytical insight in an intuitive and coherent manner."