InfiniVerse® Platform – Transforming IT Operating Models

Today, the IT market, across the board, is taking the approach to deliver products in ways that make it easier for customers to “consume.” Customers like the “cloud experience” and want to have the same experience provided by their IT vendors for their on-premises solutions, whether they are consumed on a CapEx, OpEx, or a hybrid basis. A key element of this approach is providing a “Platform” that delivers cloud-like capabilities to procure and utilize storage infrastructure regardless of the consumption method.

In fact, Gartner, one of the world’s leading technology research and consulting firms, has coined the phrase “Infrastructure Consumption Services” (ICS) to represent this new approach. They encourage IT leaders to embrace this model so they can align costs to business demands, automate operations, and reduce complexity, with an eye towards SLA-based outcomes and business benefits.

They also point out that:

It’s crystal clear that, if you’re a data storage provider of any kind, you need to be moving towards making your products consumption-based and giving customers a cloud-like experience for their on-premises storage.

That’s why we introduced our InfiniVerse® Platform!

It’s crystal clear that, if you’re a data storage provider of any kind, you need to be moving towards making your products consumption-based and giving customers a cloud-like experience for their on-premises storage.

InfiniVerse has been part of our ecosystem for years, providing a secure, cloud-based platform driven by our portfolio of monitoring and management tools − the basis for our ease of use and management. By saving valuable time on many critical management tasks, such as capacity planning, performance analysis, capacity management, and identifying performance concerns outside the storage system, InfiniVerse reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) and frees up IT teams to focus on business innovation, not day-to-day operations.

Today, we are taking InfiniVerse to the next level, elevating it to our Platform!

The graphic shows all the services that are included in our InfiniVerse Platform, from Cyber Resilience Services, Consumption Services, Lifecycle Management Services, Data Services, and Manage and Monitor Services. We already have the key building blocks in place that will be integrated over time into the InfiniVerse Manage and Monitor control plane.

InfiniVerse is an enterprise platform-native storage architecture with actionable insights to deliver comprehensive data services. Our unique platform provides outstanding IT operating model outcomes, and support for diverse modern workloads across on-premises and cloud environments. Infinidat's cyber resilient-by-design infrastructure, consumption-based performance, 100% availability, and cyber security guaranteed SLAs align with enterprise IT and business priorities.

Walter Rival, CTO at Eastern Computer Exchange, is bullish about our InfiniVerse platform in combination with our expanding portfolio of enterprise storage solutions:

“Infinidat is blazing a new path with their next-generation InfiniBox G4 system, their InfiniVerse platform, and their InfiniSafe Software for cyber storage resilience and recovery. The company is solving performance issues for enterprises, equipping customers with smart hybrid multi-cloud solutions, creating new cloud-like experiences with increased control for IT managers, and protecting data that is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Introducing these next level solutions to our global customer base strengthens the elevated data center architecture we strive to deliver.”

What are the key tenets that guide our services-oriented consumption-based storage infrastructure and how does InfiniVerse align with those, now and in the future?

To ensure customer satisfaction with our platform-native storage services, we provide:

1. Make IT Operations Easy
2. Consolidate Control
3. RAS - Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability
4. Boost Storage Admin and Overall IT Productivity
5. Perpetual IT Innovation

The following outlines these 5 characteristics along with our InfiniVerse alignment.

1. Make IT Operations Easy – Leveraging automation, innovation and technology is critical to remove complexity and overhead from IT operations and get better value for IT spend.

   How InfiniVerse Aligns
   The InfiniVerse platform provides a consolidated AIOps environment for customers’ Infinidat estate by delivering predictive analytics, early issue detection and enhanced, proactive support – a key component enabling a STaaS experience for Infinidat customers. Our InfiniOps™ technologies, which is a set of extensive software-based integration capabilities, provides highly customizable integrations with advanced AIOps functionality. This enables our customers to proactively take action to achieve targeted outcomes.

   Additionally, InfiniVerse Data Services includes InfuzeOS™ Cloud Edition in which we removed the complexity of operating hybrid multi-cloud storage. This cloud-native deployment is functionally equivalent to the on-prem InfuzeOS that enables InfiniBox platforms and is managed by the same familiar and easy-to-use interfaces and is available for AWS and Azure deployments.
    

2. Consolidate Control – This is the ability to monitor, manage, control, and automate your storage infrastructure wherever it resides - on-prem, in the cloud or on the edge. It provides real-time visibility and policy-based events consolidated by a single control plane resulting in lowering storage admin costs and increased automation.

   How InfiniVerse Aligns
   Manage and Monitor Services enables users to monitor, manage, control, and automate infrastructure components across the hybrid, multidomain estate, delivering predictive analytics, early issue detection and enhanced, proactive support.

   InfiniVerse uses telemetry-based AI/ML insights, and deep analytics to simplify IT operations management and support SLA commitments. In a recent IDC survey, users reported a 48% reduction in OpEx and 51% more efficient storage management productivity by streamlining and automating IT operations.

   Productivity improvements made by autonomous storage and the use of AI to operationalize the storage result in simplifying and reducing management costs.
    

3. RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) – This is implementing technologies, such as AIOps, to provide storage services that are reliable, have guaranteed access and availability, and are easy to service, upgrade and migrate. This also includes cyber resilience through detection and recovery from cyber storage threats, such as ransomware. Threat detection is integrated into SOC systems to identify threats and minimize exposure windows.

   How InfiniVerse Aligns
   Infinidat is an industry leader in offering SLA-based guarantees on 100% availability, performance, and enterprise cyber storage resilience and recovery.

   Our InfiniSafe® cyber stack technology provides industry-leading recovery guarantees for over two years. The deep level of Data Services offered with InfuzeOS also enables our SLA-based guarantees of 100% availability, performance, and enterprise cyber storage resilience and recovery.

   Our award-winning InfiniSafe cyber resilience stack provides immutable snapshots, creates local or remote logical air gaps, establishes a fenced forensic environment, and provides near-instantaneous recovery from cyberattacks. Our SLA guarantee enables primary storage recovery in 1 minute on our InfiniBox family or less and 20 minutes or less for our secondary InfiniGuard® solution - both regardless of dataset size.

   To extend Cyber Resilience Services further, we offer InfiniSafe Cyber Detection, which validates the integrity of data in your immutable snapshots using powerful, AI-based scanning engines. Comprehensive machine learning detects ransomware and malware attacks with up to 99.5% accuracy, so you can quickly and easily identify the last known good copy of your data for rapid, intelligent recovery.

   Additionally, InfiniSafe Automated Cyber Protection (ACP) provides the means to reduce the threat window by automating the ability for security SIEM/SOAR, syslog, and other tools located and managed in a company’s SOC to trigger immutable snaps of any data on an Infinidat storage system. We can further orchestrate the validation of the snapped data if the end user has invested in InfiniSafe Cyber Detection.
    

4. Boost Storage Admin and Overall IT Productivity – This addresses the current IT workforce and skills gap issues in the industry. Vendors need to use more AIOps, automation, and technical staff to streamline their storage operations to respond to modern, diverse workloads resulting in quantifiable storage admin operations impact.

   How InfiniVerse Aligns
   Simplified management is key to optimizing IT staff productivity, all driven by the unique software-defined storage architecture of InfuzeOS.

   Add to that, InfiniOps Technologies, a collection of extensive software capabilities that exploit world-class AIOps functionality and expedite DevOps activities. By leveraging the unique operational visibility of InfiniVerse, IT teams have streamlined storage oversight and management to high levels of simplicity. Additionally, InfiniOps offers a wide variety of tools to streamline IT operations, accelerate solution deployment, and reduce internal solution development risks, all with a proven set of IT tools that are available to further integrate InfiniBox® capabilities into IT operations for standard and container application deployment environments.

   Our business model provides a Technical Advisor (TA) for each customer at no cost. TAs are subject matter experts (SMEs) that can reduce and alleviate the IT skills gap and consult on workloads, applications, and use cases in the customer’s storage domain.

   In a recent IDC survey, users reported 51% more efficient storage admin team, boosting productivity by streamlining and automating IT operations.

   Beyond that, we leverage our ecosystem IT operations partners such as: ServiceNow, BMC, and Broadcom that easily integrate Infinidat storage into their solutions to provide a broad range of specialized software offerings that address instrumentation, monitoring, management, and virtualization DevOps tools within heterogeneous IT environments.
    

5. Perpetual IT Innovation – This addresses the continuous adoption and integration of new technologies, processes, and systems to improve IT operations. Clearly, the rate at which technology is advancing is overrunning IT users’ ability to absorb and derive benefits from the technologies. The use of more AI/ML and automation tools can help alleviate this.

   How InfiniVerse Aligns
   Yes! The pace of technology innovation is overrunning the IT user’s ability to absorb it. That’s why we lean towards more autonomous automation, to not only improve technologies’ application by ITOps, but also to address the skills and headcount deficiencies in IT.

   The basis of our management interfaces is to make them usable by those with basic technical skill sets and not needing to be deep experts in storage, especially in enterprise storage where complexity tends to rule.

   In addition to automation, we also offer Technical Advisors, at no additional cost, for each customer to provide in-depth consultation and expertise to enable the benefits of our technology. Customers can leverage the constant flow of telemetry data from our InfiniVerse environment.

Conclusion

As the IT infrastructure and operations model continues to evolve to reduce operating costs and deliver more business outcome-based SLA guarantees, it will be important to partner with an enterprise platform-native storage provider that strongly aligns with the market direction.

Our company’s position and alignment in the storage industry has been validated by respected analysts. For one, Steve McDowell, Chief Analyst at NAND Research, summarized what makes Infinidat an ideal partner for enterprises and why InfiniVerse is important.

“Infinidat is one of the top enterprise storage companies in the world today, so it’s no surprise to see them launch compelling new solutions anchored in next-generation storage capabilities. With the new G4, the expanded InfiniSafe software, InfuzeOS Cloud Edition for Microsoft Azure, and all the enhancements on the InfiniVerse platform, Infinidat has solidified its position as a ‘go-to’ solution provider for hybrid multi-cloud storage infrastructures. It’s because of innovations like these that Infinidat is now synonymous in the enterprise with high performance and lower TCO for cyber resilient storage.”

Steve also articulated a key takeaway about InfiniVerse: “The company is also making the right strategic investments in its InfiniVerse platform, delivering a strong Storage-as-a-Service offering that gives enterprises even more flexibility in deploying business-critical storage.”

Learn More

• Press Release: Infinidat Launches Next-Generation InfiniBox® G4 Family of Cyber Secure Storage Arrays, Expands InfiniVerse® Platform for Infrastructure Consumption Services
• Blog Post: Accelerating the Future of Enterprise Storage
• Blog Post: InfiniSafe® Automated Cyber Protection (ACP): Fill the Gaps in Storage Cyberattack Data Protection and Detection
• Blog Post: Infinidat Expands its Reach in the Cloud with InfuzeOS™ Cloud Edition for Azure