Infinidat Blog

The Infinidat Challenge

Wow. My blog post last week on All-Flash Array (AFA) performance generated a lot of responses. We had the most ever active sessions on our web server, great conversations on Linkedin, Reddit, The Register forums, etc., and more than a few meeting requests from potential new customers. So first, a big thank you to all who engaged, especially those in our customer community who shared their stories.

To summarize the internet dialog: It’s not likely that a room full of storage engineers will ever agree on parameters for a synthetic benchmark since storage evaluations are competitive and control of test parameters will invariably predetermine the “winner.”  However, I hope we can all agree that synthetic benchmarks are a waste of time, and that real world performance is what matters in the data center.

So, what can we do about it?

The INFINIDAT team would like those who are not yet part of our community to share the experience our customers have every day. InfiniBox makes enterprise applications run faster than AFAs, (while also being more reliable, easier to manage, and profoundly less expensive), and we’re willing to put some skin in the game to back up these claims.

So, I’m delighted to introduce a project that we call The INFINIDAT Challenge:

We cordially invite every enterprise storage customer who wants lower latency and lower storage cost to visit FasterThanAllFlash.com and sign up for The INFINIDAT Challenge.

In summary:

  • We will Give you an Infinibox system to test
  • We will Help you clone and test your environment with Infinibox
  • We Guarantee your applications will run faster on Infinibox than your All-Flash Array.
  • If we fail, we’ll take the system back and Donate $10,000 to the charity of your choice.
  • If our technology delivers, you can keep the system, and we’ll Donate $10,000 in your name to the charity of our choice (The American Cancer Society).

Thanks again to all who participated in the dialog over the past week. I know the post generated some controversy. Traditional storage companies are fighting for their lives trying to keep enterprise storage expensive; indeed their business models are predicated upon maintaining price levels from a bygone era.

All-flash arrays are perfectly fine appliances, and if they meet your use case requirements, that’s great. But we’re on the long side of the “all-flash” hype cycle, and smart customers are asking what comes next?

AFA is the endgame in the era of media-defined storage systems. What comes next is Math – new types of computer algorithms – that transform very low-cost hardware into fast, reliable hyper-storage systems that outperform expensive traditional architectures in every way imaginable. Math > Media.

If all this sounds interesting, please go to FasterThanAllFlash.com, sign up for The INFINIDAT Challenge, and award us the opportunity to prove these claims and the honor of making a $10K charitable contribution in your name either way as a small token of thanks!

Brian

About Brian Carmody

Brian is Chief Technology Officer at Infinidat.
Follow Brian on Twitter.