Infinidat Lays Out Its Storage Vision

Infinidat, a fast-growing company with a unique approach to block storage, this week announced its vision for the future of enterprise-class storage.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company, which also has a headquarters in Israel, has been building its portfolio of high-performance, highly scalable external storage for primary and secondary workloads since its inception in 2011. With its focus on consolidating multiple petabytes of data onto a single platform, Infinidat is making real inroads against entrenched competitors like Dell EMC, IBM and Hitachi.

This week, the company announced the details of its Elastic Data Fabric. The goal, said senior VP Stan Zaffos, is to enable data movement between storage arrays that are on premise, in different data centers, or in the cloud. Put another way, Zaffos said, it “allows data to reside where it naturally belongs.” He also said that there is no other fabric that supports this degree of workload mobility for block storage today.

To accomplish this goal, Zaffos said Infinidat has simplified load balancing and the ability to evacuate arrays scheduled for de-installation, making it non-disruptive and much easier to plan for. And by improving asset management capabilities, the company also has simplified the design and implementation of hybrid cloud infrastructures.

The idea makes a lot of sense, according to Eric Burgener, a research vice president with IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure Practice.

“The idea is to make it as easy as possible to manage and move workloads back and forth between public cloud and on premise private and traditional infrastructure, and Infinidat is laying out that vision so customers can understand exactly how they are going to manage these types of hybrid cloud workloads.”

The company also announced InfiniVerse, a cloud-based predictive analytics platform that takes advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“InfiniVerse provides an overall view of all Infinidat systems, wherever they might live, through customizable dashboards, giving organizations an enterprise-level view of assets in real time, using predictive analytics, monitoring and reporting,” Zaffos explained.

The InfiniVerse web-based analytics is a part of the bigger picture, he said, because it provides the intelligence on where to best put the workloads, as well as insights concerning effective asset performance and utilization. Just like allowing data to go where it naturally belongs, InfiniVerse will ultimately evolve into a that type of workload location intelligence,  he added.

Burgener said that while Infinidat competitors like HPE (with InfoSight), Pure Storage (with Purity) and Dell EMC’s (with CloudEQ) already have these capabilities, the addition of these functions to the Infinidat portfolio will make the company’s already interesting technology even more appealing to prospective customers. 

Today, InfiniVerse is available for Infinidat’s InfiniBox systems, but Zaffos said the company expects to expand it to cover all of its products. By the middle of next year, he said, Infinidat also will begin providing the ability to cluster InfiniBox systems into elastic single entities, as well as dynamic cluster-wide workload mobility without server or application awareness.