Infinidat unveils InfiniBox SSA II

Infinidat, a leader in high-end storage, just announced the second generation of InfiniBox SSA with the SSA II iteration. I have to admit that I was surprised Infinidat introduced this product as they already delivered super high level of performance and data protection and availability don't change with this evolution. But when SSD is mandatory in RFP, Infinidat has to find a way to deliver it and participate, this is as simple as that.

This product continues to leverage the 3 controllers architecture coupled with large DRAM but this time connected to SSDs in the back-end. And as I/O operations are acknowledge in the remote memory, things seem to not really change. This is true globally and on average and for large portion of I/Os but not for all I/Os and some end-users wish a consistent predictable very low latency behavior for all I/Os with very fast response time even the ones that touch the back-end, it was clearly not the case with the "classic" InifiniBox.

This new model coupled InfiniSafe coming with its immutable snapshots, virtual air gap, super fast RTO, performance enhancements, AIOps and even a better efficiency that was already very good with the 1st model. The company claims that the SSA II is the fastest AFA on the planet with 35μs of latency but we don't see any reference to some public benchmarks or officiel test we can study. This model is delivered with a new operating software with more parallelism, optimized interconnects, of course Neural Cache, its proven super efficient cache management service, InfiniOps, support of CSI 2.1.0 for Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu and Red Hat OpenShift.

As finally an I/O is written to the remote memory, what are the new stuffs that appear between a client starting the operation and the target? The answer is obvious, Infinidat embeds new faster CPU cores and adds more of them, in detail it is 16 cores per controller for a total of 48 as a InfiniBox uses 3 controllers. It is also real boost for the InfiniBand interconnect between controllers. So no surprise as the computing power received more power, the result is better, imagine the opposite. We can also imagine that same improvements on the "classic" InfiniBox should deliver same results.