Infinidat hybrid array RoI? 11 months, says IDC in sponsored white paper

Infinidat has commissioned tech analyst IDC to write a white paper looking into “The Business Value of Infinidat Storage.” The analyst’s researchers interviewed seven enterprise customers in North America and Europe. They found that the average payback time for a customer’s purchase of an Infinidat InfiniBox hybrid storage array is 11 months.

The paper said the customers involved in the study also saw an average annual benefit of $1.29 million per organization ($166,700 per PB) from using InfiniBox and realized a 162 percent return on investment (RoI) over five years. The seven customers, with an average of 14,500 employees and 735 IT staff, bought arrays with an average capacity of 8PB.

Eric Herzog, Infinidat’s CMO, said: “As enterprises modernize their storage infrastructure and consolidate workloads, IT decision-makers can obtain rapid payback and a compelling ROI with the adoption and expanded use of Infinidat’s enterprise storage solutions, while, as importantly as ever, ensuring high performance, 100 percent availability, scalability and cyber resilience.”

The IDC researchers claim the “interviewed companies uniformly found that InfiniBox provided a robust infrastructure for more efficient storage management and significantly improved data compression, with high value at low cost. In addition, InfiniBox improved the efficiency of storage management and storage performance teams and increased the agility and responsiveness they require to deploy necessary resources for business use. It also minimized storage-related unplanned downtime to improve end-user productivity. These core storage infrastructure improvements collectively boosted business operations and results, with quantified financial gains as described in this paper.” 

How did IDC calculate the financial benefit of an InfiniBox array? It lists a three-step process:

  • Gathered quantitative benefit information during the interviews using a before-and-after assessment of the impact of using Infinidat InfiniBox, such as staff time efficiencies, development productivity gains, reduced costs associated with risk, and higher revenue. 
  • Created a complete investment (five-year total cost analysis) profile based on the interviews, looking at the initial and annual costs of using Infinidat InfiniBox and additional costs related to migrations, planning, consulting, and staff or user training. 
  • Calculated the RoI and payback period via a depreciated cash flow analysis of the benefits and investments for the organizations’ use of Infinidat InfiniBox over a five-year period. RoI is the ratio of the net present value (NPV) and the discounted investment. The payback period is the point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment. 

The elements of their methodology for determining business value include:

  • 48 percent lower storage operations cost,
  • 54 percent quicker storage upgrades,
  • 55 percent more efficient storage monitoring team productivity,
  • 70 percent help desk time saved,
  • 49 percent improved backup time,
  • 89 percent improvement in unplanned downtime,
  • 19 percent faster time to market.

Time values were multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28 percent for benefits and overhead) to quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings. The net present value of the five-year savings was calculated by subtracting the amount that would have been realized by investing the original sum in an instrument yielding a 12 percent return to allow for the missed opportunity cost.  IDC prorated the benefits on a monthly basis and then subtracted the deployment time from the first-year savings.

The white paper does not reveal the cost of the InfiniBox arrays bought by the seven customers, but it does include a five-year RoI analysis table: 

If the average annual benefit is $1.29 million and the payback period is 11 months then we are looking at the $1.28 million array cost area.

This paper should make an interesting read for existing and prospective InfiniBox customers. It whets our appetite for a similar all-flash InfiniBox SSA white paper. Of course, this is sponsored research so the findings should be independently verified by interested punters.

Bootnote 

To get the 28-page IDC white paper (Doc. #US49976922, February 2023) you need to go through a registration process on an Infinidat webpage. This gets you to a 2-page exec summary with a link at the end through which you can register to get the full white paper.