Media Mentions

How can Infinidat promise storage that’s both highly available and low cost? Its CEO explains. Moshe Yanai has an impressive track record in the storage industry. Some 20 years ago while working at EMC, he developed the Symmetrix storage array and from there he moved on to start up the storage array company XIV, which was sold to IBM. He’s now come out of retirement to work on another new project, a storage company called Infinidat. The hottest innovation in storage currently is flash memory. It seems that everybody in the IT storage world is talking about flash, a technology that offers fast storage at a high cost when compared to conventional storage.

INFINIDAT is tweaking its Infinibox array design to increase its capacity. The present 3U drive trays and 2U controller enclosures will each become 1U trays, enabling an increase from 480 drives to 720 in a rack – a 67 per cent increase. These drive trays hold 60 vertically mounted disk drives. At INFINIDAT’s Herzliya office, press visitors saw an Infinibox array in the data centre with three 1U server enclosures, releasing 3U from the current 3 x 3U controller (Dell 370 server) enclosures. Below this were 1U drive trays holding rows of flat-mounted Seagate 3.5in Constellation ES drives. We calculated there were 20 drives per tray and space for 36 trays in the rack, making up the 720-drive total we were quoted.

Moshe Yanai was once a key figure in the growth of EMC, the Hopkinson-based data storage giant that helped put a spotlight on Massachusetts’ technological prowess before attention shifted from the Route 128 tech corridor to Cambridge and Boston. Years later, Yanai is looking to bring attention back to Route 128 — where many tech companies are still located — with INFINIDAT, his enterprise data storage startup that reached a $1.2 billion valuation last year and had a grand opening for its new, 23,000-square-foot U.S. headquarters in Waltham on Tuesday. With a large, emerald-tinged logo seen from outside INFINIDAT’s Totten Pond Road building, the startup is looking to give a big first impression to Fortune 1000 customers who visit its new headquarters to see its InfiniBox storage system, which the company says has a larger storage capacity than competitors like EMC and IBM, as well as a lower price per gigabyte.

One of Massachusetts’ billion-dollar startups, INFINIDAT, celebrated on Tuesday the move from Needham to a 23,000-square-foot office in Waltham, which CEO Moshe Yanai hopes will be the launching pad for a new era of enterprise data storage. INFINIDAT’s Massachusetts headcount has grown from 35 employees in March to 60 today. The company expects that number to at least double by the end of 2017. INFINIDAT has about 400 employees worldwide and its corporate headquarters are in Israel, but the Waltham office will be a focus of growth because about 70 percent of revenue comes from the U.S. market, said Gareth Taube, the firm’s vice president of marketing.

INFINIDAT, one of the few storage vendors still singing the praises of hard disk drives, is adding compression, native iSCSI and performance analytics to its high-end enterprise array platform. The company came out of stealth in 2015 selling INFINIDAT InfiniBox petabyte-scale storage systems. Its original target was the enterprise market that its founder Moshe Yanai helped EMC gain a foothold in nearly 30 years ago. Now it is trying to appeal to service providers with new features in its software version 3.0. Although flash makes up a mere three percent of InfiniBox’s total capacity, INFINIDAT claims its systems are faster than all-flash arrays. INFINIDAT InfiniBox uses flash for cache but stores all data on hard disk drives (HDDs).

When I first heard about INFINIDAT I put it in the category of FM — “Effing Magic.” At the time, Wikibon analyst David Floyer was shaping the industry’s first prediction of the so-called All-Flash Datacenter. Flash prices were falling faster than those of spinning disk (we think they still are, by the way), and the writing was on the wall for the traditional disk array. As anyone close to the business knows, INFINIDAT is led by tech visionary Moshe Yanai, who along with Dick Egan changed the storage business permanently in the late 1980s by bucking the generally accepted way of doing things. Moshe and his team are at it again.

Big iron array vendor INFINIDAT has made its third major software release, adding compression, baked-in iSCSI support and enhanced array analytics. The company’s architecture has 3 controller nodes, which each can see all the drives, and eschews an all-flash design, relying instead on up 1.2TB – 3.2TB of DRAM caching, 24TB to 210TB of NAND cache, and up to 480 x 7,200rpm disk drives. The system offers seven “nines” of uptime year – 99.99999 per cent availability. There are now four Infinibox arrays in the range:

F1000 with up to 115TB of usable capacity, 3GB/sec bandwidth and 300,000 IOPS
F2000 with 248TB – 499TB of usable capacity, 7GB/sec bandwidth and 500,000 IOPS
F4000 with 682TB – 1,024TB of usable capacity, 10GB/sec bandwidth and 750,000 IOPS
F6000 with 1,035TB – 2,765TB of usable capacity,12.5GB/sec bandwidth and 1,000,000 IOPS

The entry-level F1000 arrived in August this year.

by Randy Arseneau, INFINIDAT Chief Marketing Officer
With an often diverse mixture of legacy platforms and the need for an increasing number of storage systems brought in to support more – and ever more virtualized – environments, many organizations are facing an increasingly problematic state of “storage sprawl.” This sometimes chronic condition results in a scarcity of valuable data center floor space, an infrastructure imbued with multiple, sometimes widely divergent management and administration workflows, as well as disappointingly low levels of storage utilization and unpredictably spiraling costs. These same organizations are also invariably faced with a constant sense of urgency to meet their business objectives and remain agile enough to cope with the introduction of new ways to build and sustain competitive advantage and mounting workload volumes. To effectively address these challenges, IT leadership must plan more strategically, ensuring they take action early to avoid, and remedy, the effects of storage sprawl when it comes to IT planning and procurement processes.

Now that, as experts forecast, every business must become an IT business, radical growth presents a double-edged sword. While great for your bottom line, it may present a quagmire to your IT team. How will existing systems handle the new demands, the data influx, the storage requirements? To avoid that “snake swallowing a basketball” feeling, it would pay for growing businesses to look for ultra scalable IT — especially storage. Brian Carmody, CTO of Infinidat, Inc., and Matt Rademacher, infrastructure architect at DSW, Inc., spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Marc Farley (@gofarley), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016. Rademacher spoke about the challenges facing a company entering the Digital Age while wildly growing.

If there is one area of IT where an objective opinion is needed, it might be storage. The disk versus flash battle is raging, and conflicting advice is not hard to come by. The flash guy says that no disk storage will ever be as fast as flash; then the disk company rep counters that flash will never be as cheap as disk. To complicate matters more, some companies say that their disk-flash hybrid is faster than flash alone. So what’s the bottom line on the fastest storage for your buck — flash, disk or anything in between? Randy Arseneau, CMO of Infinidat, and Steve Kenniston, VP of Product Marketing at INFINIDAT, talked with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Marc Farley (@gofarley), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016.