Infinidat’s Latest Enhancements to InfiniBox® and InfiniGuard® Drive Opportunities and Revenue for Partners

On October 12, 2022, Infinidat unveiled a series of significant enhancements on its InfiniBox® and InfiniGuard® platforms to great fanfare across the storage industry. We expanded our cyber storage resilience capabilities, guaranteed SLAs, and larger capacity, reinforcing our leadership position for primary storage, modern data protection, and cyber resilience. But what do all these enhancements mean for channel partners? Let’s dive into the implications for the channel. First of all, let’s summarize what the new enhancements are:

• Expanded InfiniSafe® capabilities on InfiniGuard – larger effective capacity for a dedicated InfiniSafe repository of up to 35PB of effective capacity for immutable snapshots, while still having a full backup repository of up to 50PB of effective capacity, and the doubling of extendable retention of InfiniSafe immutable snapshots up to 60 days.
• New InfiniSafe cyber storage resilience guarantees on InfiniGuard – guaranteed recoverability of InfiniSafe immutable snapshots, and recovery of those immutable snapshots in 20 minutes or less guaranteed, regardless of the size of the snapshot.
• Increased effective capacity up to 72% and expanded VMware capabilities on InfiniBox – improving return on investment (ROI) and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 36%; reducing power usage by 42% per effective PB to meet sustainability requirements and fulfill the promise of “green IT”; and providing support for NVMe-oF (Over Fabrics) − NVMe/TCP for 30% more IOPs and 35% less latency than iSCSI.

These new enhancements create more value for channel partners to sell the benefits of both the InfiniBox and InfiniGuard solutions. Partners are better able to differentiate themselves and their business, producing more revenue and profit opportunities. Since IT spending is expected to stay positive, enterprises will continue to seek solutions that deliver more value.

“CIOs and IT buyers forecast that their tech spend will grow by 5.5% this year, a meaningful deceleration from their year-end 2021 expectations. But these levels are still well above historical norms – so while the feel good factor may be in some jeopardy, overall things are pretty good – at least for now,” according to Enterprise Technology Research in their October 7th “CIO Survey” report.

We have listened to the challenges customers in the enterprise and cloud service provider markets have, and we developed enhancements that delivers them real business value and real technical value. The enhancements from Infinidat are valuable for end-users so that our channel partners have the right solutions for their enterprise customers. At the same time, this is a solution-driven accelerator to help channel partners increase their business.

Our new enhancements provide an even greater opportunity to sell cyber resilience as part of a broader cybersecurity solution, expanding beyond the traditional view. Enterprises need help to fill the cyber gaps in storage today. By adopting the latest enhancements for storage and cyber resilience from Infinidat, channel partners deliver powerful solutions to forge answers that include both cyber storage resilience combined with cyber security for other parts of the data center into a single solution. And InfiniSafe can be extended across an enterprise’s entire data center and private cloud infrastructure.

With the increased need for cyber resilience and modern data protection, the enhanced InfiniGuard platform includes two dedicated repositories. The InfiniSafe repository is dedicated for cyber resilience, delivering up to 35PB of effective capacity for use with InfiniSafe’s immutable snapshots. The backup repository is dedicated for modern data protection and backup/recovery, providing up to 50PB effective capacity. Additionally, InfiniSafe immutable snapshots now have double the retention period (up to 60 days).

John Greenwood, Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Effect, a UK channel partner, had this to say, “The challenges and risks of cyberattacks are top of the agenda in enterprise data center environments and the new Infinidat cyber storage resilience capabilities − with InfiniSafe on InfiniGuard, enable us to offer a solution based on innovative technology from one of the leading enterprise storage solutions providers.”

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is

The new enhancements will help channel partners be highly competitive, no matter whether the economy is strong or softening. Deals can be won on the strength of Infinidat’s industry-leading, rock-solid guarantees. To exceed customer expectations for performance, cyber resilience, availability, and efficiency, Infinidat offers a broad set of guaranteed SLAs for its storage and cyber resilience platforms.

With the mid-October announcement, the company added two new guarantees for the InfiniGuard solution: guaranteed recoverability of InfiniSafe immutable snapshots, and guaranteed recovery time of those immutable snapshots in 20 minutes or less on secondary storage.

The feedback from analysts has been extremely positive. The highly respected analyst Phil Goodwin, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Software Platforms at IDC, stated, “Data protection and cyber security are among the top priorities for enterprises worldwide. End-users continue to search for solutions that can raise the bar in providing full cyber storage protection with confidence. By expanding upon Infinidat’s primary storage guarantees with the launch of its InfiniGuard cyber storage resilience guarantees, the company now offers a comprehensive suite of guarantees that can provide a significant value-add to their customers.”

Working in the channel, the Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Effect publicly commented about Infinidat’s guarantees as well, “In the event of a cyberattack the key is to mitigate downtime, with recovery of the immutable data fundamental to getting an organization operational and online. Infinidat’s new InfiniSafe cyber storage guarantees for InfiniGuard ensure both the immutability of InfiniSafe snapshots and guarantees swift recoverability of those immutable snapshots.”

Consolidation for More Cost Savings

The large capacity, which was unveiled on Oct 12th, gives partners an even more powerful ability to help enterprises and service providers consolidate their storage arrays, thereby saving money. The channel partner looks like the hero; the end-user is happy, and Infinidat helps the customer save, yet without cutting corners. By increasing the capacity of our flagship platforms, we are providing channel partners with very cost-effective enterprise storage while others cut cost with quality suspect products into the market.

For primary storage, the larger capacity InfiniBox platform delivers 17.287PB effective capacity. This enhancement expands the use of the InfiniBox to wider storage consolidation – with more capacity in the exact same footprint as previous models. Fewer arrays are needed to gain a substantial increase in storage capacity, reducing TCO by up to 36% and improving efficiency in power and cooling per PB up to 42%, along with less to recycle upon system retirement.

Stan Wysocki, President at US channel partner Mark III Systems, summed up our new enhancements extremely well: “Infinidat has done it again, giving us the ability to dramatically lower the total cost of ownership for our customers' enterprise storage environments. Coming out with storage solutions that have a significantly higher capacity, yet the same footprint, while simultaneously improving cyber storage resilience, has immediate benefits for substantial CAPEX and OPEX reductions and a more cyber secure environment for our customers.”

For more information about the new enhancements, go to the following blog posts that accompany this announcement. Links below:

• Even More InfiniSafe for InfiniGuard by Guy Kariv
• InfiniBox: Larger, Greener, Better ROI/TCO by John DeLuca

You can click here to listen to my interview with eChannel News about our latest enhancements. To listen to our channel partner webinar, click here.