Infinidat Blog

Unified Storage System Architecture Matters

Humanity’s data footprint is exploding. Big data, analytics, cloud, the Internet of Things, social media and more, are all driving exponential data growth. Today, capturing, storing and analyzing data at scale presents a unique set of challenges for organizations. It is too expensive, fundamentally unreliable, difficult to maintain desired performance, and consumes too much floor space and energy. As a result, modern storage infrastructures have become a patchwork of point solutions, trade-offs and compromises.

INFINIDAT overcomes these challenges by providing exceptional performance and extremely high reliability. INFINIDAT offers the greatest storage density and is designed to store massive amounts of data in a single floor tile. It does this at a disruptive price point which enables businesses to be more competitive.

Organizations are conflicted on the best way to achieve high reliability and optimal performance when it comes to their data. INFINIDAT has developed a storage architecture which boasts over 100 patented and patent pending innovations. It is not enough to simply deliver the best performance, reliability, scale or manageability. The architecture of the system must maximize these characteristics and enable businesses to achieve all their goals, without compromise. INFINIDAT delivers these capabilities in our enterprise-proven storage array, InfiniBox™. InfiniBox delivers over 1M IOPS, 99.99999% reliability and scales to over 2.7PBs of guaranteed usable capacity in a single rack.

INFINIDAT has developed a revolutionary storage architecture. InfiniBox is built with the power of three in mind, with N+2 redundancy for all components and a grid architecture that enables superior performance and reliability. InfiniBox consists of industry-standard components that are coupled with enterprise-proven software. The core storage software architecture features innovative RAID-like algorithms that are scalable and offer a dual- parity RAID schema that solves both the performance and rebuild time challenges of high capacity drives. Additionally, the architecture delivers efficient in-memory data management, flash-optimized SSD and hotspot-free automatic data dispersion. These capabilities enable InfiniBox to deliver on performance, reliability and scale.

The INFINIDAT architecture delivers the only true unified storage solution available without complex and costly bolt-ons, including support for SAN and NAS. This architecture supports the goals of the organization, including providing data access and availability on demand, growing capacity and scaling performance, all while lowering both CapEx and OpEx.

TCO Analysis

Consolidation of Competitive Arrays to InfiniBox

Power, cooling and data center footprint are additional variables that continue to be a cost drain, regardless of the advent of denser and lower-power consumption technologies such as NL-SAS and SSDs. Organizations’ data centers are literally running out of floor space and power on a global basis, requiring new facilities to be constructed at great cost. The legacy vendors in the market promise a reduction in floor space through consolidation, but in reality never deliver. InfiniBox delivers as much as a 30:1 consolidation for clients, ensuring consolidation in the data center and room to grow in the future.

The InfiniBox also helps clients further their green initiatives by enabling reductions in data center power consumption — another outcome often promised, yet never delivered by incumbent storage providers. InfiniBox makes these savings possible through consolidation, due to its scale, and its low power consumption of 8kW of power (or as low as 4 watts per usable TB).
Furthermore, in order to change the economics of the architecture, all software features are included at no additional cost, and all new functions are added simply and non-disruptively with a software upgrade.

This post was excerpted from INFINIDAT’s white paper, Storing the Future: Data at Scale.  Download the white paper to learn more.

About Steve Kenniston

Steve is a well-known storage industry evangelist and blogger (www.thestoragealchemist.com). Over the last decade, Steve has worked for storage startups such as Avamar and Storwize and helped to sell and integrate these companies into EMC and IBM respectively. As VP of Product Marketing at INFINIDAT, his mission is to help clients understand the best technologies to extract the most from their data. TEST

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