Infinidat and Kyndryl Deliver Modern Data Protection, Cyber Resiliency, and Primary Storage for a Fortune Global 500 Enterprise

Facing increasing cybersecurity concerns, a Fortune Global 500 enterprise needed to improve and accelerate its capabilities to backup critical enterprise data and recover from possible cyberattacks, while maintaining solid business continuity. They were seeking game-changing, exponential improvements − not just incremental nudges forward. They also wanted a virtual tape library (VTL) for modern data protection of their legacy AIX system services. On top of all that, the enterprise aimed to improve their primary storage to run a variety of applications and workloads. This was not unlike many other Fortune Global 500 enterprises with similar challenges.

To fix these issues, this Fortune Global 500 enterprise turned to Infinidat and Kyndryl for state-of-the-art solutions that deliver modern data protection, cyber resiliency, and primary storage. It was a perfect match with powerful, complementary capabilities that were just what the ‘storage doctor’ ordered for this global enterprise. Kyndryl is the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries, while Infinidat is a leader in primary storage, cyber storage resilience, and modern data protection focused on the Fortune Global 2000 enterprises, larger government entities, and the telco, hyperscaler, and cloud service provider market.

It was a favorable project from the start. After conducting research, the enterprise reached out to Infinidat and introduced Infinidat to the Kyndryl team, who vetted the proposed Infinidat solution and then agreed to operate Infinidat’s InfiniGuard® platform on the Fortune Global 500 company’s behalf. InfiniGuard is an enterprise-class, purpose-built data protection appliance with built-in disaster recovery, business continuity, and cyber resilience capabilities.

Metrics That Matter

The Infinidat solution enabled the Fortune Global 500 company to dramatically improve restore times for their Oracle databases, without any impact on service. The metrics stunned the customer – in a powerful way. It was a no-brainer for the global enterprise to move to the InfiniGuard platform after seeing it in action. Take a look at the metrics the customer shared with us:

• The InfiniGuard system has reduced the full backup time for one of their databases to ONLY 30 minutes from 5 hours with their former products – a 10x improvement
• Infinidat has reduced the backup time for another workload to ONLY 4.75 hours from 18 hours with the other vendors’ products – nearly a 4x improvement
• The InfiniGuard has enabled a reduction in recovery time of 97% for full copies. Additionally, the InfiniGuard solution also delivers granular recovery.
• For the VTL backup of AIX systems, the customer saw data reduction of a staggering 20-to-1 ratio.
• The InfiniGuard has reduced full physical backup time by 95%. The integrity of the backup is then fully verified and, after verification, converted to an immutable copy to protect against cyberattacks.

This was eye-opening for the customer. They had never seen anything like it. Working closely with Kyndryl, we unleashed the power of our Infinidat platform for this large global enterprise. We’re in lock step with the Kyndryl team when it comes to meeting enterprise requirements and delivering both business and technical value.

“We were glad to work with Infinidat to enable the success of our joint global enterprise customer,” said Debbie Nevin, Vice President, Global Alliance at Kyndryl. “The Infinidat team has effectively collaborated with us to solve customer issues, needs, and challenges. We look forward to working with Infinidat to support and service other mutual customers in the future.”

Cyber Resilient Storage at Its Best

By implementing the InfiniGuard solution, this global enterprise is not only able to initiate data recovery extremely fast and efficiently, but also to benefit from comprehensive cyber resilience capabilities that enhance its overall data protection. The configuration is based on two InfiniGuard systems with 500TB of post-dedupe capacity activated up-front (another 500TB available for future growth with Capacity-on-Demand), and 5 years of enterprise support provided by Infinidat.

The InfiniGuard platform includes our award-winning InfiniSafe® cyber storage resilience and recovery technology, which provides a comprehensive set of cyber resilience tools to help thwart cyberattacks, such as ransomware and malware. The InfiniSafe capabilities include immutable snapshots, logical air-gapping, a fenced forensic environment, and guaranteed near-instantaneous recovery.

The InfiniGuard is built on the InfiniBox® storage platform and has in-line ingest rates up to 180TB/hr. The differentiated value that Infinidat offered to the global company also included consolidation of deduped backups, plus primary storage “incremental merge” functionality, allowing production operations to resume directly from backup appliances to expedite recovery with outstanding latency. By resuming operations directly on backup storage without compromising performance, Infinidat enables additional significant reduction in cyber recovery times. In the event of a cyberattack where the primary storage is still offline or compromised, the InfiniGuard has the ability to mount and run the Oracle database directly from the InfiniBox embedded in the InfiniGuard.

On the primary storage front, the Fortune Global 500 enterprise chose to replace their two legacy storage vendors with Infinidat. The customer saw the clear business and technical value of our industry acclaimed InfiniBox enterprise storage platform. They deployed the InfiniBox for their mission critical applications and workloads. The applications on the InfiniBox include: SAP, Oracle, SQL, fraud detection, and real-time billing applications in a virtualized environment.

Dave Sawyer, Global Account Director for Kyndryl at Infinidat, commented, “Infinidat and Kyndryl were in synch with our complementary expertise to solve issues for our mutual global enterprise customer. There was a comfort level that Infinidat is a leader in enterprise modern data protection, cyber resilience, and primary storage. The trust between Infinidat and Kyndryl gave the enterprise customer added confidence that they were getting a world-class set of solutions and services. Our synergy with Kyndryl is amazing, and we look forward to future projects where we can replicate this type of compelling customer success story.”

Reinforcing the strong partnership that exists between Infinidat and Kyndryl, both the InfiniGuard and InfiniBox solutions work with Kyndryl Resiliency Orchestration services. This ensures compatibility in the capabilities to recover data and in platform configurations at rapid speed in the event of a cyber outage. Additionally, both the InfiniBox and InfiniGuard are enabled for use with Kyndryl clients.

To get more information about how Infinidat worked with Kyndryl to support this Fortune Global 500 customer, reach out to your Infinidat and Kyndryl sales teams.