Media Mentions

Infinidat, which specializes in petabyte-scale data storage systems, on Nov. 14 launched the latest release of its InfiniBox core operating software, v4.0, that now uses machine-learning algorithms to produce high performance.
The rise of enterprise digital transformation requires new ways of thinking about information storage, the company said. Infinidat offers a new storage architecture that is fundamentally different from the consumer-centric cloud storage platforms of the last decade and earlier legacy enterprise storage systems.

Big-iron array supplier Infinidat’s fourth major version of its software adds sync (block) and async (file) replication, file directory quotas and quality of service features to quiet down noisy neighbours. Infinidat says it collaborated with more than 100 customers on the features for this release, in the planning and development cycle, letting it talk about a social programme and community development.

Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing led the funding round, which brings Infinidat’s total funding to $325 million since its 2011 founding. The company also said the C Round haul gives it a $1.6 billion valuation. The storage array startup founded by EMC Symetrix developer Moshe Yanai claims to have several profitable quarters behind it and 250% year-over-year revenue growth for the second quarter of 2017.

Moshe Yanai’s Infinidat has gained $95m in third-round funding and wants us to know that it’s not a debt-fuelled Silicon Valley extravaganza of a startup like others that have crashed and burned or gone through bought-at-a-discount acquisitions. Infinidat was founded in 2010, took in $80m around 2012, $150m in 2015 and has notched up $325m in total funding with the latest C-round, bring its value to $1.6bn. We’re told it has enjoyed a a 33 per cent increase in valuation in less than two-and-a-half years because of its growth in revenues.

You might think a storage company that’s placing big bets on spinning disks would be roadkill in the race to flash storage, but Infinidat Inc. has done a good job of defying conventional wisdom since it was founded six years ago.
Today, the company is announcing $95 million of new investment in a Series C round that values it at $1.6 billion, up from $1.2 billion at the time of its last funding round in April 2015. Infinidat has now raised a total of $325 million.

Data storage company Infinidat Inc. has raised $95 million from a growth equity wing of Goldman Sachs, indicating that the 6-year-old company continues to find traction in a market where others have stumbled recently. The company turned profitable during the past year, according to chief marketing officer Randy Arseneau. Arseneau didn’t share revenue numbers, but the company says it grew 250 percent from second-quarter 2016 to second-quarter 2017.

A glance at the IT storage industry press today would reveal an avalanche of marketing aimed squarely at convincing readers that the future of IT storage is “all flash” or SSD-based (solid state disks).Indeed, with much of the messaging one would be forgiven for thinking that flash is the panacea for storage and that the HDDs (hard disk drives) are headed for a mournful demise. However, the truth couldn’t be further from the picture painted by this all-flash-marketing firehose. The hard disk drive industry is in fact very much alive and well.

Change is good, but only in measured doses and for well-defined goals. At least, in the world of enterprise storage arrays where the latest is rarely the greatest, according to Randy Arseneau (pictured, left), chief marketing officer of Infinidat Inc. “We never shy away from the concept of general purpose storage. That became very unfashionable about five or six years ago when everything had to be hyperspecialized and fit for purpose,” Arseneau said. However, the benefit of being general is limitless flexibility; this is indispensable for large businesses with a huge variety of workloads, he explained.

Moshe Yanai has been re-thinking the box for more than 40 years, inventing new configurations of the large containers in which we keep the data generated by our constantly expanding digital lives. Data is eating the world and Yanai has been staying on top of its exponential growth by applying smart algorithms (what is now popularly called “artificial intelligence”) to cost-effectively store and manage data. First at Siemens-Nixdorf, then at EMC, he went against IBM, the dominant data storage player at the time, and won. Then Yanai re-configured storage twice again, with XIV which he sold to IBM in 2007, and now as founder and CEO of Infinidat, a startup valued at $1.2 billion (in 2015) which grew 144% last year.

A major selling point of innovative cloud infrastructure is limitless scalability. Ironically, once an organization hits mega scale, economics could send them hurtling back from advanced all-flash storage to more old-school methods. “The all-flash array movement is great for certain workloads,” said Erik Kaulberg (pictured, right), senior director of cloud solutions at Infinidat Inc. However, companies should think carefully about whether their workloads belong to that category before they invest, he added. “For 80 to 90 percent of common data center environments, it’s just a way to make storage expensive again,” Kaulberg stated.