Infinidat Blog

Infinidat + VMware: Great Today, But Only the Beginning!

 Infinidat + VMware: Great Today, But Only the Beginning!

When we founded Infinidat almost a decade ago, we knew that in enterprise environments, customers treat their storage not as an island , but as a piece of a broader solution, and it’s critical that all of those pieces fit together seamlessly. Most Infinidat customers run petabyte-scale mission-critical workloads on our InfiniBox storage systems, and VMware is their hypervisor of choice. From the beginning, in addition to doing great things for storage admins, we have promised to make the lives of virtual infrastructure admins (VI admins) easier, more efficient, and more effective.

​  Infinidat + VMware: Great Today, But Only the Beginning!

And we’ve delivered on that promise. Over the past 10 years, Infinidat has provided tight integrations across the VMware portfolio of offerings, including:

  • vSphere ESXi – in addition to ongoing interop testing, InfiniBox implements VAAI storage primitives to offload host activity where possible
  • vCenter – Infinidat’s Host PowerTools for VMware (HPT-VM) software automates best practices compliance, provisioning, snapshots, and advanced storage functionality like single-VM restore, allowing the VI admin to self-manage their storage needs directly within vCenter
  • Site Recovery Manager (SRM) – Infinidat delivers a storage replication adapter (SRA) for SRM that makes it easy to implement, monitor, and orchestrate replication arrangements, including asynchronous, synchronous, and active/active replication support
  • vRealize Operations (vROps) – the InfiniBox management pack for vROps provides full visibility of InfiniBox storage metrics
  • vRealize Log Insights – the InfiniBox content pack for vRealize Log Insights makes it easy to parse storage-related data directly in the Log Insights console
  • vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) – Infinidat has published a reference architecture for a stretched cluster, further strengthening our guaranteed 100% availability
  • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (previously known as Pivotal Kubernetes Service and VMware Enterprise PKS) – the InfiniBox Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver can be used to provide container-native storage in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition, or the VMware Cloud Native Storage (CNS) CSI driver can be used with InfiniBox backend storage for broader TKG deployments
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) – Infinidat storage can be used as Principal Storage in VCF deployments, supporting workflows like the VMware Machine Learning Platform (vMLP) recently demonstrated as part of the VMware Data for Good initiative

You can find out more about any of these integrations at our VMware microsite, https://infinidat.com/vmware. All of these capabilities are provided at no extra charge with Infinidat products, including our premium support and service offerings.

These integrations help a majority of our customers – and our friends at the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab – to run petabyte-scale VMware on our systems. But you don't have to take my word for it. You can see that many of our Gartner Peer Insights reviews mention VMware, like this large utility customer:

“[The InfiniBox] VMware plugin is taking storage management to the next level. It’s a huge step towards moving our company to a more DevOps methodology by giving more teams the ability to work with the storage device that aren't on the storage team.”

Sr. Systems Engineer, $1-3B Energy & Utilities Company, June 25, 2020

This is just one example of a happy customer who recognizes that our core values of performance, scale, reliability, and TCO map directly to business-critical challenges in their VMware environment. At the end of the day, we are focused on customer outcomes, and our extensive VMware integrations help drive positive customer experiences and enable broader workload consolidation across our platforms. So what comes next? Stay tuned for news next week – our VMware better-together story is about to get even better!

Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitutes the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

About Erik Kaulberg

Erik Kaulberg is Vice President Strategy and Alliances at Infinidat, leading Infinidat’s overall strategic development, key alliance partnerships including VMware, and special projects. He has broad expertise in enterprise storage and frequently engages key customers, partners, and analysts. Erik previously ran worldwide enterprise storage strategy and business development for IBM, after he sold all-flash array innovator Texas Memory Systems to the company.