Infinidat accelerates high-end array

High-end enterprise array supplier Infinidat has added a faster top-end system with boosted hardware and software, increased cyber-resilience, and enhanced AIOps and DevOps capabilities. 

Infinidat supplies InfiniBox arrays with DRAM caching delivering 90 percent or more of read requests from memory, with disk-based and all-flash SSA systems both faster than typical all-flash arrays thanks to its “Neural Cache.” The company provides 100 percent data availability and claims a lower TCO than comparable systems. The SSA systems contributed roughly 15 percent of its overall revenue in the first 2022 quarter. 

Phil Bullinger, Infinidat
Phil Bullinger

Infindat CEO Phil Bullinger said in a statement: “Infinidat is accelerating its business with the InfiniBox solid-state array platform, expanding our opportunities and capturing all-flash wins in the enterprise storage market where the highest levels of performance and availability, extensive cyber-resilience, and cost-effectiveness are required for the most demanding applications and workloads.”

There are multiple parts to Infindat’s news; first is the updated InfiniBox SSA II array, adding cyber-resilience to Infinidat all-flash systems, enhancing InfiniBox’s OS for increased parallelism, and adding AIOps to Infinidat’s arrays.

The SSA II is an enhanced SSA I with more capacity, faster controller CPUs delivering more IOPS and throughput, increased InfiniBand paths, and file access protocols. A table comparing the two existing SSA “S” models with the two new “T” models is below:

Infinidat comparisons

Delivered IOPS have increased by 53.3 percent and throughputs have risen by half as well. Infinidat says its InfiniBox SSA II has 35 microseconds of latency, lower than any other comparable enterprise storage platform in the industry.

The InfiniBox OS was optimized for additional interconnects (InfiniBand), gained more parallelism for additional cores, and has new algorithms for workload optimization. NFS and SMB file access were also added. The OS automatically adapts to changes, such as adding new servers and applications, without human intervention.

Cyber-resilience is an important aspect of Infinidat’s announcement and its InfiniGuard secondary storage system is being, in effect, extended to cover its entire InfiniBox array portfolio, including the SSA II, with an InfiniSafe Reference Architecture. This provides immutable data snapshots, logical air-gapping, a fenced forensic environment, and virtually instantaneous data recovery from the snapshots.

InfiniOps is Infinidat’s automated operations brand. In July, Infinidat unveiled its AIOps offering – Neural Cache – InfiniVerse cloud-based, AI-driven monitoring, predictive analytics and support spanning Infinidat’s systems and ecosystem of AI technology partnerships. This has developed into InfiniOps, which has tighter integration with the AIOps datacenter ecosystem and also the DevOps world.

Infinidat now supports CSI 2.1.0 for Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu, and RedHat’s OpenShift environment. It also has Ansible integration to simplify storage system management and integration.

The InfiniBox SSA II is available for purchase or with Infinidat’s flexible consumption options, like all Infinidat products, including Storage-as-a-Service with Infinidat’s FLX program and Capacity-on-Demand with Infinidat’s Elastic Pricing model.