Media Mentions

Brian Carmody, CTO of INFINIDAT, came by to discuss his company, its technology and the release of a new product. I find it fascinating how many different takes suppliers have come up with on the concept of storage services and storage virtualization. INFINIDAT clearly has some interesting ideas for the industry to consider. Here’s how the company describes itself: INFINIDAT provides next generation enterprise class storage at a disruptive price point … INFINIDAT employs commodity hardware to deliver highly efficient multi-petabyte capacity in a single rack. The InfiniBox solution also delivers mainframe-class reliability with an unprecedented 99.99999% availability, and over 750K IOPS of performance.

Moshe Yanai’s INFINIDAT high-end enterprise array is getting added file support, better disaster recovery and an entry-level system. The InfiniBox F2000 entry-level box is an 18U rack enclosure with 250TB of usable capacity with 3TB disk drives or 330TB with 4TB drives. The original and ongoing InfiniBox F6000 offers up to 2PB of usable capacity in a 42U rack. The new configuration has the same code base, management capability and “seven nines” availability as the F6000. INFINIDAT’s array software is now unified in that it has had file-based access added to its block base. It supports NFS v3.0 and has up to 2PB of usable capacity. The file-based pool of storage, like the block base, can be as large as the entire usable capacity of the system, and both files and blocks are allocated from a common base pool of storage.

Today INFINIDAT announced that it was expanding its InfiniBox Storage Family. The InfiniBox line now offers unified block and file support in a single rack. Though the InfiniBox known for having very high capacity (2PB per rack), it is now being offered in a more midrange system starting at 250TB, the InfiniBox F2000. And INFINIDAT is adding a near synchronous replication capability. All new InfiniBox Storage devices will come is NAS functionality enabled and existing devices can have the functionality through a non-disruptive software update. This new NAS functionality is a native software-based NAS implementation, not a NAS front-end. The NAS capability is designed for hyperscale workloads and INFINIDAT states that it supports high performance access to thousands of files and multi-petabytes of capacity on a single file system. The new NAS functionality supports all of the features of INFINIDAT block storage including: a single automated management console, zero latency, non-blocking high performance snapshots, thin, smart clones, self-healing high-availability, hybrid disk/SSD infrastructure, and non-disruptive upgrades.

INFINIDAT on Monday announced that it is adding NFS v3 support to its InfiniBox systems for no charge, introduced a new midrange model and added near synchronous replication capability. The InfiniBox storage arrays support both block and file in the same rack. NAS capability is available via a non-disruptive software upgrade and supports thousands of files and multiple petabytes under a single file system. The NAS capability supports zero latency, an automated management console, snapshots, thin clones, self-healing and a hybrid disk and SSD infrastructure.

US storage vendor INFINIDAT has hired former EMC sales manager James Byrne as part of its Australian expansion. Byrne joins the four-year-old company as country manager for Australian and New Zealand and will be based out of INFINIDAT’s new Melbourne office. Prior to joining INFINIDAT, Byrne was EMC’s Isilon district manager for ANZ for over two years, and Unified and Isilon storage manager for a year. Byrne said INFINIDAT has already signed three partners in Melbourne, one in Sydney and two in Perth, pending an Australian launch. Arrow has also been signed on to distribute in Australia and New Zealand.

Global data storage challenger INFINIDAT has set up in Australia as part of its plans to continue its global rollout. Started in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Moshe Yanai, INFINIDAT made headlines earlier this year with $150 million in new funding led by TPG Growth taking the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion – placing it among the most valuable privately held companies in the world. INFINIDAT has employed experienced data storage executive James Byrne as Country Manager for Australia and New Zealand where he will be based out of Melbourne. Byrne was recruited from INFINIDAT’s largest competitor EMC where he was most recently Isilon District Manager for Australia and New Zealand.

INFINIDAT, an enterprise-class storage systems company founded by industry vet Moshe Yanai, had its unofficial coming out party at VMworld 2015. The company recently announced a 300 percent sales growth for Q2 2015 and had a funding announcement in April. INFINIDAT CMO Randy Arseneau explained to Dave Vellante of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, why the company appeals to the enterprise. “We are broadly applicable to a wide range of workloads,” he said. “We came to market at an interesting time, where there is a lot of noise and confusion around convergence and hyperconvergence. Enterprises are looking for a cost-effective, high-performance tier to put their mission-critical workloads on. This represents for them not only a consolidation platform, but also delivering very robust, highly differentiated storage services.”

INFINIDAT, whose founding team developed EMC’s Symmetrix and IBM’s XIV enterprise storage solutions, formally unveiled its InfiniBox storage in April. The InfiniBox is a high-density, high-performance storage system the company said offers low-power consumption and costs less on a per-gigabyte basis than other enterprise-class storage.

In the perfect world, a data center would have a single storage system. One that would provide high performance and high capacity in a single platform that doesn’t take up much data center floor space. Ideally, this system would be reliable enough that it could back itself up to an even more cost-effective storage tier but one that is again part of the same system. Unfortunately, the data center is not a perfect world. It has to respond constantly to new and often unexpected requests, and “throwing hardware” at the problem seems like the fastest way to appease the demand, especially in the new “agile” data center. As a result, there is more storage sprawl in the modern data center than ever. But the data center should not give up on the consolidation dream. In fact, the need to respond quickly is all the more reason to invest in a consolidated architecture, but that architecture has to meet certain requirements so that the data center does not have to compromise its agility.

Moshe Yanai’s INFINIDAT startup, which came out of stealth in April with its InfiniBox array, is bragging about its growth. It recently revealed figures including: 1.) 300 per cent sales growth in the second quarter compared with Q1 2015. 2,) 500 per cent growth in channel sales. 3.) 53 per cent of global sales came through resellers and distis. Whisper it, but these high growth rates could be from smallish number bases of course. But, you have to say a three-times revenue jump from one quarter to the next is a great fillip, small base or not.