Block array supplier Infinidat says a move to 20TB disk drives has enabled it to increase high-end system capacity by more than 70 percent and add more capacity for backups and immutable snapshots.
Infinidat supplies disk-based InfiniBox arrays, all-flash InfiniBox SSA arrays, and disk-based InfiniGuard data protection arrays. It also has InfiniSafe software technology, safeguarding snapshots that can be used with InfiniBox and InfiniGuard. The InfiniBox and InfiniGuard systems are designed with predictive DRAM Neural Caches to serve most IO requests from memory, making these arrays both speedy and capacious for primary storage workloads.
CEO Phil Bullinger claimed: “We listened to the challenges customers in the enterprise and cloud service provider markets have and are solving those challenges by enhancing our InfiniBox and InfiniGuard platforms with additional best-in-class capabilities, rock-solid guarantees, and an even greater ability to improve cyber resilience and optimize TCO.”
The high-end InfiniBox array has increased maximum capacity to 17.28PB effective after compression and thin provisioning. The prior top-end F6300 InfiniBox provided 10PB effective capacity. That total has increased 72.8 percent by moving to 20TB disk drives. CMO Eric Herzog told B&F: “The power profile of the larger drives is very, very close to the smaller drives … We did no adjustment to power, no adjustment to the fan infrastructure.”
That means the watts-per-PB number has improved, down by 42 percent, were told. Infinidat reckons that TCO has improved by up to 36 percent as a result. Customer shipments of the new InfiniBox started last month.
These 20TB drives will probably be fitted to the smaller models over time, the F4300 and F2300. They are being used in the InfiniGuard data protection/cyber resiliency arrays now, though, and this upgraded InfiniGuard line also started shipping last month.
There are three InfiniGuard arrays: B4306, B4312 and B4320.
The usable capacity of the B4320 was 2PB-plus and that’s moved to 3.4PB-plus with the larger disks. After data reduction, Herzog said: “This is going to yield us a total for the entire new model of up to 85 petabytes plus in a single 42 inch rack.”
The InfiniGuard arrays have two repositories, InfiniSafe for immutable snapshots and a Backup repository.
The smaller B4306 and B4312 InfiniGard arrays have the InfiniSafe repository included in their enclosures, along with the backup repository, which means that their total backup capacity is limited by some of the overall capacity being used for the InfiniSafe store.
The larger B4320 takes advantage of the 20TB drives and has separate storage areas for the Backup and InfiniSafe repositories, 35PB effective for InfiniSafe and 50PB effective for backup. It can be configured to different sizes if customers wish.
InfiniSafe immutable snapshots can now have a doubled retention period of up to 60 days. The InfiniGuard array also gets guaranteed recoverability of InfiniSafe immutable snapshots in 20 minutes or less, irrespective of the snapshot sizes.
An operating system update delivers NVMe over TCP certification with vSphere ESXi, and vVols replication with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) integration.
Get an InfiniBox datasheet here and tech specs here. Download InfiniGuard tech specs here.
Read a blog about the new InfiniBox here and another about InfiniSafe here.
