Driving the High Performance of the InfiniBox SSA™
Think highest-performance model that makes people’s heads turn. Uncompromising. Sculpted for speed and latency. Maximum engagement. You may be thinking I’m talking about the McLaren Spider sports car, but I’m actually referring to the InfiniBox SSA™ platform, a storage system publicly announced in June that delivers the industry’s highest performance for the most demanding enterprise applications.
The comparison of the SSA model with a popular, high-end sports car is relevant, however, when answering the question of why an enterprise company would pick InfiniBox SSA vs. InfiniBox. Having the InfiniBox SSA is like having a McLaren in your garage for the weekend “road warrior” trips that are anything but “average,” while having the standard workhorse InfiniBox is like driving a high-performance “everyday car,” such as a Mercedes or BMW, during the average work week.
Showcasing the InfiniBox SSA platform: Infinidat’s first 100% solid-state technology for persistent storage. It is powered by Infinidat’s proven deep learning software algorithms and extensive DRAM cache, consistently delivering performance and latency results that surpass all-flash arrays (AFAs).
The InfinBox SSA is a good fit for applications that require not just average top performance (sub millisecond) across the entire breadth of their I/Os, but consistent top performance for each and every I/O. It meets the most intensive, enterprise-class storage requirements.
The types of real-time applications for which the InfiniBox SSA is ideal are found in environments that are ultra-mission critical or life critical, such as healthcare, control systems or the military, or even where small variations in timing can have dramatic financial impact, such as financial market analysis and trading. Essentially, real-time applications that must be as precise in timing as technologically possible benefit from the InfiniBox SSA’s uncompromising capabilities.
The InfiniBox SSA for profiles requiring consistent ultra-low latency is, in fact, complementary to the standard InfiniBox system for general-purpose applications, which are the vast majority of enterprise applications. The InfiniBox SSA is built on the same core architecture of InfiniBox.
"The InfiniBox architecture has been a game-changer for us, as it helps us meet our SLAs to the business around performance, guaranteed 100% availability, support and ease of use," said Matt Bieri, Chief Information Officer at Tyler Technologies. "Our most demanding applications, representing about 5 percent of our workload, require sustained sub-millisecond latency. We're excited to bring in the InfiniBox SSA, which leverages the same InfiniBox architecture, Neural Cache and feature-set, for these ultra-high performance workloads."
Due to our design, we are able to dissociate attached storage hardware, and it is relatively easy to change the media behind the scenes when it is helpful. A common software base between the standard InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA provides seamless, transparent data mobility between the platforms, enabling customers to optimizing latency based on application demands, while reducing overall TCO. With both systems, large enterprise customers are able to consolidate and address their application workloads with the right mix of performance and latency at the right cost.
Interestingly, we’re seeing customers achieving 3x the original captured performance with 40 percent lower latency, even during multiple failure scenarios. This enables companies to support their higher-demanding service level agreement profiles on the SSA platform better than they have been able to do with legacy AFA products.
Due to extremely efficient thin provisioning, continuous space reclamation, and inline data compression, maximum system capacity utilization is possible. The InfiniBox SSA’s architecture delivers the industry’s highest availability and non-disruptive upgrades. The hardware redundancy design (n+2) enables rapid recovery from any component failure. It provides FC and iSCSI protocols concurrently, in a single platform, making it easier to consolidate workloads.
Anchored in the strength of the engineering behind it, the InfiniBox SSA provides the same 100% availability, ease of use, scalability, and lower TCO that the standard InfiniBox platform is known for. To borrow from the analogy used earlier, you’re in for quite a ride.
