Kaminario K2 (discontinued) vs. Komprise

K2 works well in our mixed-use virtual environment. I would not hesitate to place any workload on K2, it has always performed well. We use fiber-channel connectivity as it replaced our large legacy storage array, replacing one rack of spinning disks with 4U of flash.

Incentivized

As any other archiving solution, it is very well suited for environments with a large footprint of unstructured data (CIFS / NFS shares for user data) with a large amount of unused/old files and a need to keep those unused files for long term. In our scenario, due to some legal and contractual constraints we need to keep these files for 15 years. Archiving is a good choice to move the unused files to a cheaper storage tier, both on-prem or cloud.

Incentivized

• Great performance
• Great support
• Super-simple to use

Incentivized

• It gives you a good overview on user data: files age, sizes, file types, owners, etc.
• It is very flexible on the archiving policies.
• The data scans are really fast without affecting storage's performance.
• It has a great alternative to STUB files, which they call 'bread crumbs' (symlinks to files).

Incentivized

• Not well known, so third-party support is lacking
• Data reduction is good, but not as good as expected (actual 2.7:1)

Incentivized

• Its licensing plan, which takes into account the amount of data analyzed instead of data transferred.

Incentivized

We performed a bake-off with K2 and one other vendor and they performed identically. K2 pricing was aggressive, performance was great, and it offered the features that we needed at a price that we could afford

Incentivized

We have used Veritas Enterprise Vault in the past, and besides its being a well-known player on the data archiving market, their tool is far more complex to implement, to manage and to keep working. Komprise is very robust and also very easy to implement, as most part of the job is done on Komprise side. The management console is delivered through a public URL as a SaaS platform. You only need to deploy a few VMs for scan/archiving/user access, which they call "Observer VMs." Komprise also doesn't uses Stub files, which is a poor implementation adopted by the competitor for file access. We had a lot of issues in the past with stub files. Komprise has implemented 'bread crumbs', which are CIFS symlinks to the files on the Observer. It is a very good implementation and it works really well.

Incentivized

• Installing K2 reduced runtime of one of our batch processes, freeing up one employee for other tasks.
• Less time managing storage.

Incentivized

• It allowed us to free up some space on our main storage during a time where we didn't have the budget to expand it.
• It allows us to move unused data to a cheaper storage tier (Azure Blobs).

Incentivized