Infinidat, the high-end disk-based storage array maker, today announced it has deployed more than six exabytes of storage capacity, up from 5EB six months ago.
The company anticipates continued demand for petabyte scale systems to accelerate growth in customer numbers and total storage deployment. It notes that shipping “over 1EB in less than six months is 50 per cent faster growth than the nine months prior”. (Incidentally, 1EB can represent 83,333 x 12TB disk drives; or 100 arrays at 10PB/array average; or 50 arrays at 20PB/array.)
The company argues that all-flash arrays (AFA) at scale are prohibitively expensive and in its release today pointed out that its 6EB of storage capacity is more than the top eight all-flash array (AFA) vendors shipped in 2019.
Infinidat’s marketers appear to be comparing total capacity shipped for their company with only one year’s capacity shipped by its AFA competitors. No need for that, when it is demonstrably growing so fast.
Capacity for growth
We have charted Infinidat’s deployed capacity using its own statements (e.g. 3.7 EB in September 2018);
In November 2018 Infinidat CTO Brian Carmody told Blocks & Files: “Our average customer has 7.3PB of InfiniBox, and our largest have over 100 PB.” A 10PB/array average looks to be not unreasonable 14 months later.
InfiniBox upgrade
Infinidat today updated InfiniBox Storage Software to Release 5.0.11. The upgrade adds replication with Active-Active Consistency Groups, support for the FIPS-140-2 federal data protection standard and makes changes for the next generation of its DRAM/NAND Neural Cache engine. This speeds read and write data accesses.
