Infinidat, founded in
2011, provides next generation enterprise class storage at a disruptive price
point. Through the use of its patented Infiniverse Storage Architecture™,
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. Automated provisioning, management, and
application integration provide a system that is incredibly efficient and easy
to use. Infinidat is changing the paradigm of enterprise storage while reducing
operational overhead, complexity and cost.
Who's who in SSD? - Infinidat
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
- September 2015
I didn't exactly rush to write about Infinidat
because although I started seeing PR messages from the company 5 months ago -
their web site at that time had no publicly viewable useful data on it. And the
company still - at the time of writing this - hides even the most basic
information about their products behind a sign-up barrier.
To my mind
that's suggests a marketing mindset which is rooted in the paper based direct
marketing of the 1980s rather than the web
based information sharing culture - which has been the basis of the
enterprise market (which
I've been associated
with) for over 20 years.
Anyway - after some recent prodding - by
a marketer at Infinidat - I did break the habits of a lifetime and sign up to
see some information about the company on their
resource page which
should never have been hidden in the first place. (Unless it was a competitor
who was designing their web strategy.)
Here's what I learned.
- Infinidat is in the
hybrid appliance
market. Their solution has a 2% ratio of flash to HDD storage - and is
positioned as multi petabyte (you wouldn't buy it unless you were looking at PB
scale) high resilience, unified storage with a self healing architecture.
- Re high
availability here's what I learned from
an
ESG document (pdf)
In particular:- Infinidat's system uses triple
modular redundancy, has a
big controller
architecture approach to RAIDlike
data rebuilds which make them to complete faster. Infinidat rebuilds to the
free space in the array rather than to just a single drive, and rebuilds only
data - rather than blank space. The result? Infinidat claims that "even
following the loss of two six terabyte drives, the time to return to full
redundancy is less than 15 minutes." That's important - because as classic
RAID users know only too well - they are vulnerable to data loss if failures
are clustered in time and locality when their HA systems are already compromized
by reacting to earlier bunch of failures.
That 15 minute recovery
window is noteworthy but not unique.
Typically vendors have been
reporting classic RAID rebuild acceleration in HDD arrays of 20x - since 2010
- based on legacy HDD RAID accelerated by SSD servers. Modern cloud-like
micro-tiering architectures can be much faster.
In those respects
Infinidat is similar to other best of breed competing private cloud
technology solutions (who offer HDD heavy hybrid pools). It's the writes to a "free
storage pool" - rather than to a newly installed drive - which is the key
accelerant in such systems. But having said that - when it comes to minutes
of time - recovering full resiliency on a pure flash storage array is
generally faster than in a hybrid.
With fault windows - it comes
down to cost,
how you
account for it and what you're willing to pay for.
What does seem
to be rare - and more like the embedded
industrial
market than the enterprise market - is that Infinidat says it runs infant
mortality testing on each newly built system for a full month before shipping.
That filtering process reduces the incidence of infant mortaility in the array
population which is epxperienced by its customers. |
| .. |
High Availability
enterprise SSD arrays
Enterprise
SSDs - the Survive and Thrive Guide
7 SSD types will satisfy all
future enterprise needs
what do I need to
know about any new rackmount SSD?
Decloaking
hidden preference segments in enterprise flash |
| .. |
|
| |
| Infinidat secures $95
million C round |
Editor:- October 3, 2017 - Infinidat today
announced
it has closed a $95 million Series C financing round. Equity raised by the
company to date totals $325 million.
Infinidat says that several
hundred enterprise customers have adopted its (hybrid storage)
InfiniBox platform
with more than 2 exabytes of storage deployed globally.
StorageSearch news
archives | | |
| .. |
 |
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I asked Infinidat - what articles do you recommend to my readers so they
can understand your thinking about the SSD market?
See what they said
in the new edition of the
SSD Bookmarks
- on StorageSearch.com | |
.. |
 |
.. |
.. |
Extended pre-shipment burn
in...
why doesn't everyone do it? |
Apart from the fact that it would slow down the
sales ramp... there can be downsides too in such an approach. Especially in
fast flash systems.
In an earlier phase of the enterprise flash market
one systems vendor told me they had to be careful to ensure that their burn-in
didnt eat too much into the lifetime of the system because it could zap 10%
off the
endurance of
the flash memory population.
See also -
failures in time and SSDs | | | |
