Infinidat Blog

Software Driven Business Advantages in the Enterprise Storage Market

Not too many years ago, enterprise storage solutions were all about hardware-based innovation, delivering performance and functionality by adding dedicated and proprietary hardware components. And while this approach had its golden era, it failed when presented with the need for fast scaling and a quick evolving ecosystem.

At Infinidat, our mission from day 1 has been to provide the enterprise storage market with an enterprise storage platform that drives its benefits from software innovation while using standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components. This enables Infinidat’s all-inclusive business model to deliver a constantly evolving and improving storage platform, while keeping cost low and empowering our customers to enjoy new features and functionality without procuring additional hardware.

This approach has played out very well for our customers over the years, allowing them to benefit from a plethora of innovative software features being introduced into the product and to gain from a constant improvement in real life performance resulting from the core architecture, NeuralCache, getting better and better with every software release.

One such example is our highly performant Active-Active replication which Infinidat included in our solutions several years ago and is a 100% native, software only feature. By following the software only approach, existing customers that already owned two or more systems, were able to take their data availability approach to the next level, enabling a true 0 RPO/RTO configuration that delivers a fully symmetric replica without any penalties for reading and writing concurrently on both sides of the link, just by doing a simple, non- disruptive, and completely free software upgrade.

Another good example is our industry leading vVols integration, which scales 3X than the next best competitor, providing the VMware admins with a streamlined approach to consume and manage storage resources directly from the vSphere client. Add that to all the fundamental enterprise grade storage needs Infinidat is fulfilling such as 100% availability, non-compromising triple redundancy, zero penalty snapshot engine with a 4 seconds refresh cycle, an easy-to-use fully fledged WebUI, and comprehensive integration across the enterprise data center and IT ecosystem and you come out with a winning solution the delivers the best set of real-world application performance, high availability, and cost effectiveness.

When the time came to develop our award-winning InfiniBox SSA and the recently announced InfiniBox SSA II, we choose to go with the same approach and use the same core software, utilizing the proven NeuralCache architecture to drive even better performance for mission critical applications that demand strict latency requirements for each and every I/O by amplifying the solid state media characteristics with DRAM latency. By doing that, we maintained the same advantages presented earlier to our enterprise customers. Furthermore, we maintain 100% compatibility between the InfiniBox and Infinibox SSA families, enabling customers to enjoy a seamless and simplified management experience across their storage estate, and to non-disruptively migrate block workloads across if needed.

As another testimony to the longevity of our software centric approach to storage, I'm happy to share that recently announced support for SMB file sharing, released as part of our 7.0 code, is simultaneously available across our InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA families and which all of our existing customers enjoy as a free of charge, non-disruptive software upgrade.

This iterates once more, that Infinidat continues to provide its customers with real value and truly delivers on the need for a fast, reliable, and evolving enterprise storage platform.

About Guy Kariv

Guy is an industry veteran, with many years of experience in various disciplines of the IT industry, ranging from primary storage and data protection to applications, cyber security and cloud. As field CTO, EMEA, Guy is helping Infinidat’s  customers to transitions their storage infrastructure into modern, business driven, IT-as-a-Service operations , improving business agility while reducing operational overhead.