Media Mentions

INFINIDAT, Ltd, a provider of enterprise storage solutions, announces that INetU, Inc., a managed cloud hosting and security services provider headquartered in Allentown, PA, has installed the InfiniBox enterprise storage solution to provide its customers with a more scalable, flexible system for managing their most important asset, their data. INetU offers SAN infrastructure to private cloud customers in order to meet their demanding performance needs. In an expansion of that offering, INetU has teamed with INFINIDAT to provide a shared SAN option that features a lower price point, faster provisioning and more flexibility to meet customers’ ever-changing storage needs. “As a managed cloud service provider, we wanted to be able to offer our customers a high performance shared SAN solution that can be quickly provisioned,” said Andrew Hodes, CTO, INetU.

INFINIDAT’s product is called Infinibox. It’s a monolithic storage system, or could even be called next generation monolithic, and competes against EMC VMAX, HDS VSP or 3PAR 10K. It’s not all-flash. It’s hybrid, with lots of RAM and flash at the front-end and big 7200 RPM disks at the back-end, bringing a total usable capacity of 2PB per rack. The product is designed to be resilient, and everything is N+1 (for example it has a particular three-controller configuration, unusual but very effective). The first time I saw INFINIDAT’s Infinibox I thought about XIV; the two products have some design similarities, and, as far as I know, many engineers followed INFINIDAT founder Moshe Yanai in this new venture when he left IBM after disputes about the development of XIV.

In our 26th episode we talk with Brian Carmody (@initzero), CTO of INFINIDAT. Howard and I also talked with Inifinidat at Storage Field Day 8 (SFD8), a couple of weeks ago which recorded their session(s). For more information about INFINIDAT, we would highly suggest you watch the videos available here. As they say, Brian is wise beyond his (35) years and was highly conversant about the history of storage, IT in general and current industry trends – must have had good mentor(s). He made mention that many of today’s Billion dollar IT businesses were first dreamt up at EMC but failed to make a significant impact there. The podcast starts out talking about the changes impacting the storage industry today and the rise of the startups, all due to the great enabler – flash. INFINIDAT has a hybrid storage solution that uses controller based SSDs as a read cache for data that resides on 7200 RPM disks and uses sophisticated DRAM caching for read and write back cache.

I’ve had the chance to talk to INFINIDAT many times in the last six months, however, Storage Field Day 8 served best to understand its technology. Enterprise storage DNA. I won’t go deep into talking about INFINIDAT as a company, you can find all the info you need on their website… but there are a few important things to mention. Its founder is Moshe Yanai, the inventor of Symmetrix as well as many other storage systems and technology, a sort of legend in the storage industry. The company is incredibly well funded, I’m sure that just having a company with such a founder attracts money. But what struck me since the first meeting we had is the fact that they have a lot of enterprise customers already and are selling like mad (I think the last press release talks about a 61% increase in revenues in the last Q, with massive international growth).

INFINIDAT Ltd., provider of advanced enterprise storage solutions, delivered 61% quarter over quarter sales growth in Q3 2015, including a 255% increase in international sales. 49% of global sales came through reseller and distributor channels. INFINIDAT, which has been shipping the InfiniBox enterprise storage solution since late 2013, surpassed a quarter of an exabyte in the amount of storage shipped to customers. INFINIDAT added several brand name customers in Q3 from a spectrum of vertical markets, including finance and banking, insurance, telecommunications, education, healthcare and cloud service providers. New customers include Meitav Dash (Israel), CetSI (France), MD Anderson Cancer Center (US) and INetU (US).

INFINIDAT, the creation of storage industry guru Moshe Yanai, saw 61 per cent quarter-over-quarter growth in the third quarter. The five-year-old, privately-owned company produces high-end file/block access external arrays with seven-nines (99.99999 percent) availability and fast disk loss rebuild times, with a claimed sub-six-minute rebuild time after a twin disk failure. INFINIDAT crowed about its: 1.)255 per cent increase in international sales, and 2.) 49 per cent of global sales coming through reseller and distributor channels. 3.) More than 250PB of INFINIDAT storage has been shipped to customers. 4.) It signed 25 new reseller and distribution agreements in the quarter. 5.) There are now 104 global channel partners.

INFINIDAT has expanded its InfiniBox Enterprise Storage family of storage arrays by adding two new capabilities and a new midrange model. Earlier this month, INFINIDAT appointed James Bryne as country manager for Australia and New Zealand, to be based in Melbourne and focus on establishing a greater presence in the region. “We have signed Arrow to distribute our solution across Australia and New Zealand. It is exciting times for us and we are actively recruiting new partners across both countries,” says Bryne. The INFINIDAT InfiniBox complete family of systems is available now, and the new NAS capability will be generally available November 2015, from INFINIDAT direct or via one of its partners.

Brian Carmody, CTO of INFINIDAT, came by to discuss his company, its technology and the release of a new product. I find it fascinating how many different takes suppliers have come up with on the concept of storage services and storage virtualization. INFINIDAT clearly has some interesting ideas for the industry to consider. Here’s how the company describes itself: INFINIDAT provides next generation enterprise class storage at a disruptive price point … INFINIDAT employs commodity hardware to deliver highly efficient multi-petabyte capacity in a single rack. The InfiniBox solution also delivers mainframe-class reliability with an unprecedented 99.99999% availability, and over 750K IOPS of performance.

Moshe Yanai’s INFINIDAT high-end enterprise array is getting added file support, better disaster recovery and an entry-level system. The InfiniBox F2000 entry-level box is an 18U rack enclosure with 250TB of usable capacity with 3TB disk drives or 330TB with 4TB drives. The original and ongoing InfiniBox F6000 offers up to 2PB of usable capacity in a 42U rack. The new configuration has the same code base, management capability and “seven nines” availability as the F6000. INFINIDAT’s array software is now unified in that it has had file-based access added to its block base. It supports NFS v3.0 and has up to 2PB of usable capacity. The file-based pool of storage, like the block base, can be as large as the entire usable capacity of the system, and both files and blocks are allocated from a common base pool of storage.

Today INFINIDAT announced that it was expanding its InfiniBox Storage Family. The InfiniBox line now offers unified block and file support in a single rack. Though the InfiniBox known for having very high capacity (2PB per rack), it is now being offered in a more midrange system starting at 250TB, the InfiniBox F2000. And INFINIDAT is adding a near synchronous replication capability. All new InfiniBox Storage devices will come is NAS functionality enabled and existing devices can have the functionality through a non-disruptive software update. This new NAS functionality is a native software-based NAS implementation, not a NAS front-end. The NAS capability is designed for hyperscale workloads and INFINIDAT states that it supports high performance access to thousands of files and multi-petabytes of capacity on a single file system. The new NAS functionality supports all of the features of INFINIDAT block storage including: a single automated management console, zero latency, non-blocking high performance snapshots, thin, smart clones, self-healing high-availability, hybrid disk/SSD infrastructure, and non-disruptive upgrades.