Kaminario K2 Data Recovery
Kaminario K2 was an all-flash, scale-up-and-scale-out array built on the SPEAR operating system, organising storage into K-Blocks made up of paired K-Nodes. Kaminario later refocused its business around a cloud data platform under the Silk brand, and legacy K2 arrays in production today are typically maintained as standalone on-premises systems rather than actively developed hardware.
Platform Lineage and Naming
Kaminario released successive K2 generations, with K2.N introducing an NVMe-based fabric for lower latency between K-Nodes, following earlier SAS/SCSI-based generations 4 through 6. Each generation retained the same architectural pattern of paired controller nodes forming a K-Block that could be scaled up with more capacity or scaled out with additional K-Blocks.
Kaminario subsequently rebranded its business as Silk, shifting focus to the Silk Data Pod and a broader cloud data platform; existing K2 hardware deployments continue independently of that newer product line.
- Kaminario K2 generations 4, 5, 6
- Kaminario K2.N (NVMe fabric generation)
- SPEAR OS
- K-Block, K-Node
- Silk / Silk Data Pod (successor company and product)
Generations and Models We Evaluate
| Generation / family | Models |
|---|---|
| K2 generations | K2 Gen4, Gen5, Gen6 |
| NVMe generation | K2.N |
Architecture and Data Layout
A K-Block pairs two K-Nodes for active/active controller resilience, with SPEAR OS managing adaptive block-level deduplication and thin provisioning across the pool. Additional K-Blocks can be added to scale out capacity and performance together.
SPEAR OS deduplicates and places data adaptively, meaning the physical location of a given logical block can shift over time as the system rebalances, which is a factor to account for when reconstructing volumes after a serious fault.
K2.N replaced the earlier SAS-based interconnect between nodes with an NVMe fabric, improving inter-node latency while keeping the same K-Block/K-Node logical structure.
Protocols and formats: Fibre Channel, iSCSI, VMware VAAI
- Data is protected within each K-Block using a RAID-like scheme managed by SPEAR OS, with specifics varying between generations.
- Adaptive deduplication means logical volumes reference shared physical blocks, so damage to shared blocks can affect multiple volumes simultaneously.
Failure Scenarios
Logical failures
- Deleted volumes or snapshots
- Failed SPEAR OS upgrade
- Deduplication metadata corruption
- Replication misconfiguration between K-Blocks
- Host file system or database corruption inside presented volumes
Hardware failures
- Multiple drive failures within a K-Block exceeding protection tolerance
- K-Node failure with incomplete failover to its pair
- NVMe or SAS fabric faults between nodes
- Power-loss events affecting both nodes in a K-Block
What Not To Do Before an Evaluation
- Do not run rebuilds, reconstructions or re-initialisations against an array that has already lost more drives than its protection level allows.
- Do not recreate pools, aggregates, disk groups, storage pools or clusters — these operations write new metadata over the structures a recovery needs.
- Do not swap drives between slots, and do not reorder shelves. Record the original slot and shelf positions before removing anything.
- Do not run file-system repair tools against production volumes before the underlying storage layer has been evaluated.
- Do not restore a backup or replication set over the affected volumes until the recovery scope has been assessed.
- Do not eradicate deleted volumes or empty recycle/destroyed states on platforms that hold deleted data for a retention window.
Our Evaluation and Recovery Process
- Intake and platform identification — array model, generation, firmware, protection layout and the sequence of events that led to the failure.
- Read-only evaluation of the media and array structures, including assessment of drive health and the extent of any physical damage.
- Forensic imaging of all contributing media, with cleanroom work where drives require it. Originals are preserved unaltered.
- Reconstruction of the storage layer — pools, aggregates, parity groups, chunklets, extent groups or objects — from the images.
- Extraction of the layers above: file systems, virtual machines, databases, mailboxes and shares.
- Verification against a file list and customer-nominated critical data, followed by secure return on encrypted media.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Kaminario K2 the same product as Silk?
No. K2 is the earlier on-premises all-flash array; Silk is the company's later cloud data platform. They share heritage but are architecturally distinct, and K2 arrays are treated as a standalone recovery scenario.
Does deduplication complicate recovery?
It can, because a physical block may be referenced by several logical volumes, so the evaluation needs to establish how deduplication metadata was affected by the fault before reconstruction can proceed.
Can one failed K-Node bring down the whole system?
K-Blocks are designed for active/active resilience between their two K-Nodes, so a single node failure is normally tolerated; problems arise when failover itself is incomplete or when both nodes in a block are affected.