Moshe Yanai is stepping down as CEO of Infinidat

It's a big news for Infinidat and an interesting one for the storage market meaning that Kariel Sandler, COO and Nir Simon, CFO, become co-CEOs.

We spoke with Moshe Yanai exactly one month before his blog during The IT Press Tour and we didn't notice any indication of such organization change. It seems that only a very few people was in the loop.

This move invited us to put in perspective Moshe Yanai career and professional trajectory with the different brands and products he designed with his team. For more than three decades, Yanai has had a significant impact on the storage industry with essentially three brands and products: EMC with the famous Symmetrix family, XIV and since 2011 at Infinidat. All of them are block storage array and Infinidat has added some file capabilities to address unified consolidation projects.

Born in 1949 in Israel, Yanai earned a B.Sc in electrical engineering in 1975 from Technion, the famous Israel Institute of Technology located in Haifa.

We can split his career in four phases:

The first phase started at Elbit Systems, a joint project with Nixdorf Computer, to build an IBM-compatible mainframe data storage based on minicomputer disks. He then moved to US for Nixdorf to develop high-end storage systems.

The second phase that gave honors at Yanai is of course associated with his time at EMC, for several known by the EMC2 acronym for EMC Corporation. EMC was founded in 1979 by Richard Egan, Roger Marino, ?. Connolly and John Curley to offer memory boards for Prime Computer and later other computers types like DEC VAX and Wang Laboratories minicomputers.

Rapidly, the company was led only by Egan and Marino and a few years later, around mid 80's the team identified the need to develop a mainframe data storage system with a first product in 1998 that appeared to be a disaster. In the meantime, EMC went public in April 1986 raising $30M and the revenue that year was $66.6M.

This decision to address high-end storage needs really transformed EMC to a rocket star in the storage industry but also beyond storage. Recruited by Egan, Yanai arrived in 1987 to develop the Symmetrix line and Mike Ruettgers joined in 1998 as COO to become CEO in 1992 until 2001 and this era was a stellar period.

In September 1990, EMC unveiled its first Symmetrix Integrated Cached Disk Array with some ideas Yanai continues to keep active i.e at that time a cluster of PCs, 5.25 HHDs and a big (at that time) DRAM for caching with RAID 1 data protection scheme. The main idea of Yanai was to write data to a remote memory to then land to HDDs with intelligent caching algorithms. Under Yanai technology leadership, EMC release several generation of Symmetrix and the product was a best seller.

Joe Tucci joined EMC in 2000 as President and COO and became CEO in January 2001 and Yanai quit EMC the same year in 2001 as an EMC Fellow probably due to some strategic divergence around Data General acquisition and the development of storage for open systems. We heard that Yanai got a big check and Symmetrix royalties on every sale following his departure for many years.

The 3rd era is XIV, an Israeli company Yanai started in 2001 to start a new generation of high-end disk storage array. And again the same idea appeared with a grid of x86 servers with their own resources i/e DRAM and disks, some of them acting as interface modules exposing host protocols (FC and iSCSI) and other as data modules for data persistency within the array connected to the interface ones via a fast switched redundant network based on InfiniBand. With SSDs coming to the market, a new level of storage was added between the caching layer and the HDD pool.

XIV releases generation 1 and IBM generation 2 and greater following the acquisition in January 2008 for $300M. Yanai led the XIV team and became an IBM fellow, he left in 2010.

The last and current epoch is Infinidat, Moshe founded in 2011 as CEO and this company represents the last iteration of his idea of a scalable high-end disk array still with DRAM as cache, Flash and HDDs to offer one of the lowest TCO on the market. This time 3 all-active Linux servers acts as interfaces nodes connected to all 816 HDDs drives provided by 8 JBODs via a fast interconnect in the back-end. We expect NVMe over RoCE soon.

Infinidat has proven his success and adoption with already 6EB deployed as of in Q4/2019: 3.7EB in Americas, 1.9EB in Europe and 388PB in APJ. As of today Infinidat has raised a total of $325M in 3 rounds becoming a storage unicorn in April 2015.

Since the first product iteration, Yanai ideas such symmetric clustering, global caching and multi-level storage finally span all these 3 eras - EMC, XIV and Infinidat - with of course significant improvements, new algorithms with machine learning and the integration of new hardware components.

Moving to this position invites us to think about a semi-retirement period or the reverse more time dedicated to technology and future developments at Infinidat. But it exists of course another assumption with an exit always in mind when you reach the age to retire. We all remember Pat Martin who sold StorageTek to Sun Microsystems in 2005 or Joe Tucci who did the same with Dell in September 2016, they both got a big check to protect their retirement and several family generations ... But the difference is they were not founders. The future will tell us the reality but for sure Infinidat is attractive for several companies.

Yanai was also a stakeholder at Diligent, a pioneer in data deduplication, then sold to IBM in 2008 for $200M. In parallel, Yanai has some other board seats result of his investment, at Axxana, a data protection company, and in the medical company Sight Diagnostics. Infinidat acquired Axxana in 2017 and uses the technology as InfiniSync.

Known for several innovations and inventions, Yanai is associated with approximately 40 US patents in the field of electronic data storage.

In June 2011 his Alma mater, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, awarded him the honor Distinguished Fellow of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and in 2012, conferred upon him an Honorary Doctorate. He has been a board of directors member of several companies.

Good Luck Mr Yanai, deep respect for your industry contributions, we wish you all the best.

Photo taken with Moshe Yanai (3rd left), Brian Carmody, CTO (5th left) and Dan Shprung, EVP EMEA Sales (2nd right)
with The IT Press Tour group in November 2016 in Israel

(I wrote this post for StorageNewsletter and it was originally published May 14th)