Infinidat Blog

Infinidat’s InfiniBox - What’s the Big Deal? A Better Vision! - Part 3

As mentioned in Part 1, and Part 2, I’ve come to learn that there are three things that differentiate Infinidat’s InfinBox from all the alternative Enterprise Storage offerings in the market while providing greater customer value:

1.) A better product
2.) A better business model
3.) A better vision for the future

In this blog, we’ll examine Infinidat’s vision for the future.

3.) Infinidat has a Better Vision and Roadmap for the Future of Your Data

In May 2019, Infinidat publicly announced our long-range strategic vision with the introduction of the Infinidat Elastic Data Fabric and the availability of the first pieces of that vision.

In Part 1 we discussed some of the assumptions that influenced the architecture of InfiniBox. There are additional assumptions that influence Infinidat’s overall vision.

  • The amount of data that users generate and need to store will continue to grow at double-digit rates. MBs became GBs which became TBs which became PBs, and EBs are on the horizon, with no end expected.
  • Due to concerns about fault domains becoming too large, enterprises have deployed dozens, and sometimes hundreds of storage arrays to meet their capacity requirements. This has created data management, D/R, data migration and asset management nightmares for users.
  • In today’s world where the IT infrastructure is often an integral and mission-critical part of the business itself, ANY downtime - whether planned or unplanned - negatively impacts the business, customers, and bottom line. Nothing less than 100% continuous availability with continuous operations is desired - now and forever.

Imagine starting with your first InfiniBox, today. Before it is installed, we will work with you to establish capacity expectations going forward, and will only charge you for what you currently require. But if you expect to grow capacity (like most organizations) we will have already installed the backend media to support your future growth, so that when you require that extra capacity, it simply gets turned on and provisioned, without the need for software license keys to be turned on or a service visit to physically install additional backend capacity.

Eventually, maybe 3 to 8 years from now, you may likely want to update to a newer generation of InfiniBox. With non-disruptive data mobility (available now) infrastructure refreshes will be non-disruptive.

Your capacity requirements may also eventually be greater than the multi-PB capacity of today’s largest single InfiniBox. The Infinidat Elastic Data Fabric will implement the concept of an Availability Zone (AZ) for InfiniBox. Think of an AZ as a cluster of multiple InfiniBoxes that can be managed and monitored as if they were a single logical storage system, using InfiniVerse (InfiniVerse is available now). Imagine different InfiniBoxes of different generations able to co-exist as part of the same AZ, and able to non-disruptively either join the AZ or be removed from the AZ. Imagine seamless online data mobility between the different members of the AZ to facilitate load balancing and non-disruptive infrastructure refreshes, and the ability to have servers see a 100% continuously available AZ FOREVER, even as the technology within the AZ changes over many years.

Now imagine another AZ, at a remote location, able to also participate as part of the same Elastic Data Fabric providing seamless multi-site integration and business continuity for disaster recovery. And lastly, imagine AZs that can exist in any of the popular public clouds also able to participate in the same Elastic Data Fabric.

With the Infinidat Elastic Data Fabric, you can expect:

  • A single logical storage “system” that can start RIGHT NOW with today’s InfiniBox and then grow non-disruptively to Exabyte scale. We don’t see any competitors doing anything quite like this for Enterprise Storage.
  • 100% continuous data availability, forever, across multiple generations of storage technology, with a 100% uptime guarantee NOW
  • The elimination of traditional storage data migrations
  • Manage storage at Exabyte scale with the ease and simplicity of a single easy-to-manage system
  • Seamless integration as needed with the popular public clouds

So that’s my subjective observation so far about Infinidat: a better product, a better business model, and a better vision. That’s why I wanted to join Infinidat - to be able to be a part of this disruptive technology, where the customers win!

None of it matters unless Infinidat customers really do achieve greater success with InfiniBox than they would have with any of the alternatives, and it’s only their opinion that matters. To see what Infinidat’s customers have had to say about their experiences, and to compare Infinidat with your current storage vendor, please check out Gartner Peer Insights, or please contact us directly or your Infinidat business partner, for more information.

About Ken Steinhardt

Ken Steinhardt serves as Field CTO at Infinidat. He has held many different roles in the IT industry over the last 49 years, having started as a mainframe applications programmer and systems analyst, part-time when he was still in high school. After receiving his BS degree in Computer Science from WPI, Ken was at Digital Equipment Corporation for 16 years, EMC Corporation for 20 years, and joined Infinidat from Pure Storage. His longest-tenured role was as EMC's Vice President of Enterprise Storage & CTO for Global Product Sales.