Infinidat confirms a strong market adoption

Infinidat, a leader in high-end storage, did a very interesting session during the recent IT Press Tour transformed into a digital format due to the exceptional situation.

Moshe Yanai, CEO and founder, updated us on the company, the product value proposition and the market climate. To refresh readers, Infinidat sells a super high-end storage array faster than flash, highly scalable, delivering a very low TCO. To achieve that the engineering team mixes DRAM, flash and HDDs. In a nutshell performance are high because hosts write to a remote memory, acting as a write cache, performance is super high as DRAM is faster than flash. No question about that, this is why Infinidat doesn't need to be full flash and users realize that this approach delivers also a compelling price/performance ratio. As HDDs are still less expensive that flash, Infinidat costs less then AFAs.

The current InfiniBox continues to embed 3 batteries, 3 linux servers acting as storage controllers, and 8 JBODs coupling 96 CPU cores, 4.1TB max of RAM, 368TB of flash max and 816 drives (= 8 x 102) for a total of approximately 10PB max of HDDs and delivers 2M+ IOPS.

Recently Infinidat confirmed that more than 6EB has been shipped which represents a key milestones as a company with 3.7EB deployed in Americas, 1.9EB in EMEA and the rest 388PB in APJ. Wow it's huge.

Moshe insisted that the COD - Capacity On Demand - already well adopted and during an uncertain period, it represents a real weapon as users delay new purchases and projects. It's so easy to continue to extend and deploy storage capacity without a pain with internal purchase processes and potential difficulties to contact vendors and them to produce and ship products. Coupled with this is the remote support capabilities that makes IT operations and maintenance transparent for the business.

During this exceptional period, users adopt agility and OpEx represents such model as no budget got approved for CapEx. History has proven that during recession and period right after, cost is the most important metric as users refuse to believe in complex, sometimes hypothetical TCO model.

Three business models are presented, the obvious CapEx one of course, the confirmed now classic COD and the company introduced a new one named FLX as a pure OpEx model. FLX idea is to align purchase behavior to the public cloud with monthly billing, increase and decrease capacity with a minimum of 3 months of subscription, in fact a real elastic model, very common in the public cloud.

Infinidat confirms its go-to-market with 100% indirect sales model with distributors and VARs networks plus system integrators such Capgemini and Accenture...

In terms of customer example, 3 famous examples were displayed, a retail company and Zerto, respectively consolidating 18 arrays into 1 and 12 into 1 and the presentation was concluded by a live moment with Brightsolid, a regional cloud provider based in Scotland.

Coldago Research recent end-users survey shows 2 interesting results, you can download FREE this report here:

• the first one is about needs and projects and consolidation is still super high,
• the second one is about end-users block storage vendors rankings and Infinidat is #5 following NetApp, Dell EMC, Hitachi Vantara and Pure Storage but before IBM and HPE.

The team reaffirmed also its Elastic Data Fabric vision with the idea to decouple the data lifecycle from the hardware refresh cycle.

4 key elements support this strategy:

1. InfiniBox + InfiniGuard Active/Active replication,
2. FLX acquisition model for both offering,
3. Hybrid cloud with Infinidat Neutrix Cloud coupled with AWS, GCP or Azure.
4. and finally a console to manage all sites with InfiniVerse.

The value of Infinidat comes from its advanced cache algorithm based on machine learning (ML) and decades of experiences with strong engineering DNA. ML is used to analyze in realtime workload with a fine grain metadata understanding. Also Neural Cache optimizes data residence, locality and IO operations on 3 tiers - DRAM, flash and HDD - to deliver high performance - high cache hit ratio in read and write mode (write is easy as the ack is made in cache) - as a very efficient cost with 1:90 TB of RAM vs. Flash and 1:2400 vs. HDD.

Neutrix Cloud is the 4th model promoted by Infinidat this time connected to giant's cloud.

Infinidat is a good example of Software-Defined Storage delivered as an appliance for high end needs. Here SDS transforms a farm of servers and JBODs into a large storage pool exposed via file and block access methods. Consolidation goes beyond block for many user and they need to glue NAS to finally consider an unified storage approach and Infinidat is very well positioned for such needs.

We need to pay attention carefully to Infinidat in 2020 gaining market share regularly.