SSA Express - Guaranteed All-Flash Experience on the InfiniBox®

InfiniBox® is an award-winning hybrid storage array that leverages our powerful, patented Neural Cache technology, combining the performance of DRAM and Flash with the capacity of hard disk. After 8+ years in Infinidat, I am still in awe of how our customer-used systems continue to achieve a greater than 95% cache hit ratio(!) for mixed production workloads. It is even more impressive to see that most of this cached data is served from DRAM and the rest from Flash.

Figure 1 - Read Cache Hit Ratio

With InfiniBox being deployed at the world’s largest enterprise customers (with an incredibly high satisfaction rate), we realized that a small subset of the enterprise datasets, whether due to the I/O profile, or because of the mission criticality, require a 100% guaranteed fast-media access. Two years ago, we released our InfiniBox™ SSA, with the same Neural Cache/DRAM capabilities, but with SSD drives instead of the rotating drives and delivering unmatched low latency as low as 35 microseconds. We are now able to tailor the right system - whether Hybrid or SSA - to the right environment.

Our customers want the best of both worlds, and we are listening and working with them to make sure we create something that is “just right.” Something that provides the functionality needed and leverages all the goodness of what the InfiniBox platforms provide in reduced OpEx costs and reduced management. Something that doesn’t recreate the wheel, something simple that will give them amazing performance, compelling economics ($/TB), the best in cyber storage resilience and recovery SLAs, and 100% availability guaranteed of the InfiniBox, while at the same time enabling the customer to have all the benefits of 100% All-Flash performance.

It’s no secret that Infinidat employs the best Engineering and Product professionals, and they clearly heard what our customers were asking for. This isn’t new our teams consistently seek customer feedback, both on the existing offering, and for their future needs.

SSA Express is a new software feature that will be available for InfiniBox at no cost as part of an InfuzeOS™ 7.3 update, available in Q4, 2023. SSA Express further enhances the performance and use cases of our InfiniBox enterprise storage solution by providing the equivalent of a mid-sized all-flash array within a hybrid array! With SSA Express, you can proactively add datasets to the InfiniBox's dedicated SSD drives (If needed, customers can purchase additional SSD drives to increase SSA Express’ capacity), making this ideal for customers that require guaranteed, low latency reads from SSD for performance sensitive applications and workloads on their InfiniBox. (Remember that WRITES are always performed through DRAM! With much better performance compared to SSD.) Additional capacity is installed by Infinidat services teams and is non-disruptive to the operation of the system.

Chris Evans, Principal Analyst at Architecting IT commented, “Infinidat has consistently shown powerful business and technical values reside at the heart of the solutions it brings to market, reflecting the continued commitment it has made to its enterprise customers. The SSA Express Software is one of the latest examples of Infinidat's high-value solutions for enterprise storage. Large enterprises can trust Infinidat to deliver continuous innovation, which cannot be said about every storage vendor."

SSA Express eliminates the need to purchase a separate siloed flash array to support certain applications’ performance, enabling enterprises to confidently consolidate all workloads on InfiniBox, saving OpEx, floor space, power, cooling, and IT resource management.

Howie Evans, Vice President at Dallas Digital Services, stated, “For our customers that require fast, low-latency application performance, but still want lower CAPEX and OPEX, we will be recommending SSA Express Software. No longer do enterprise customers need to augment their InfiniBox with a smaller all-flash array in order to obtain high performance for some of their critical applications. Infinidat has basically done the equivalent of embedding a small all-flash array inside of an InfiniBox hybrid. This opens up a whole new world of benefits and conversations that need to be had with enterprise customers.”

A few technical points:

• In its first release, SSA Express capacity starts at 17TB and goes as high as 320TB
• SSA Express supports Volumes and File Systems
• A dataset that uses SSA Express will enjoy every InfiniBox feature that exists today – InfiniSafe® cyber resilience and recovery, Replication, Snapshots, etc.
• Customers will be able to flexibly add/remove datasets from SSA Express
  • Adding a dataset to SSA Express will ensure it will be serviced from fast media (DRAM or SSD)!
• SSA Express will be available on all InfiniBox systems with a simple, non-disruptive, code upgrade.

Click here to read our press release announcing the SSA Express.

You can learn more about all the capabilities of the SSA Express here.

You can also read today’s blog about the new model of the InfiniBox SSA II by clicking here.