The driver that wins the big race does not get as much credit for the win if he simply drove the fastest car on the track. After all, logic says the driver should win. A recent trend in data storage has been to migrate to all flash array storage solutions. Flash drives are certainly faster than HDD disks. For those enterprises that implement AFA storage arrays, performance is definitely fast, which it should be using the logic of the fastest racecar. However, there are companies that are achieving ultrafast performance without having to pay the premium price for high performance storage media. Now that is real innovation.
The high cost of Flash Storage
While SDD may be the fastest disk on the street, it does not make AFA a best alternative. Just as the fastest car on the track is also most likely the most expensive one, AFA storage solutions are costly. A single SSD disk is more than an HDD. The price differential for a single disk may be negligible, but the more storage you need, the more that price differential multiplies. Now imagine if your organization utilizes 100 petabytes of data. Suddenly that price differential is spiraling upwards in the same exponential fashion as your data capacity growth. Despite its costliness, many storage vendors are introducing AFA solutions as the easy way to increase the turbo performance to your storage.
Not all data is equal
This does not mean that SSD is not a viable solution. You certainly have some data that you can justify the need for flash storage. However, that is key term, “some”. Every company has a data profile that emulates a triangle. The small share of data that justifies high-value high-performance resides at the top. The wide base of the triangle represents the majority of your data that consists of lesser value. It can also tolerate greater latency. This is why despite the appeal of flash storage performance, AFA solutions still only account for 15 percent of the total footprint of external storage capacity sold today.
Do not confuse speed with innovation
Storage innovation equates to more than just speed, and hardware innovation is not the only approach to deliver it. Infinidat is proof of this. In fact, Gartner names Infinidat as a leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. Gartner does not designate you a leader just because you have the fastest hardware. They do so because you deliver innovation on multiple fronts. Infinidat set about to create a solution specifically designed for petabyte storage environments, one that does more than just store bits and bytes, but provides a competitive edge for petabyte enterprise environments. The result was the creation of an entirely new approach to building and scaling storage infrastructure called the Infinibox enterprise storage array.
What Infinidat delivers
Infinibox utilizes hybrid architecture that incorporates HDD disks as well as an allotment of SSD drives to deliver the right mix of media storage. Don’t associate the integration of HDD with decreased performance however. In fact, Infinibox is faster than AFA storage. How is this possible? Through innovative design that incorporates DRAM caching as well a machine learning algorithm called Neural Cache that uses I/O history to recognize data correlations in data access patterns in order to optimize future performance.
Infinibox delivers more than just high throughput and microsecond latency. Its single 42U rack provides over 8PB of effective storage capacity. Infinibox maximizes disk utilization through highly efficient thin provisioning, continuous space reclamation, space-efficient snapshots and inline data compression. Those enterprises that require more even more capacity but have unpredictable future growth can take advantage of Infinidat’s flexible consumption option called Capacity on Demand (COD). With COD, companies only pay for the storage presented to their storage and applications. When more storage is needed, they simply pay for it to have added capacity unveiled.
Infinidat created Infinibox from the ground up for high availability and reliability. It’s self-healing architecture incorporates a hardware redundancy design of (n+2) that helps enable rapid recovery form any component failure. Its resilient design can withstand the failure of up to 12 drives and provide reliability at a level of seven nines.
Security is another aspect in which Infinidat separates itself from AFA solutions. Encryption and traditional approaches to data reduction by nature do not coexist for AFA designs. Infinidat overcomes this challenge by incorporating a software-defined approach towards encryption. Thanks to 30 years of collective innovation, Infinibox is able to deliver reduced TCO objectives for both encrypted and non-encrypted data.
Economics at petabyte scale
Large companies are always trying to leverage their inherent economies of scale to their own advantage. Infinibox allows companies to unify their data center-scale pools of storage to overcome the conflicting desires of faster and less expensive performance. With a power load of only 4 watts per usable terabyte, Infinidat customers can quickly garner significant power savings in addition to reduced disk media costs. Savings is also achieved by consolidating the storage footprint through data reduction. When you add it all up, it is no wonder that CFOs as well as CIOs are embracing Infinidat to help them build competitive advantages by attaining superior data services while coinciding realizing substantial cost savings in operational costs. For petabyte enterprise environments, you no longer have to scale your budgets in the same exponential fashion as your data capacity growth. With Infinidat, you can be the first to cross the finish line, without breaking the bank.
NEXT STEPS: Find out why CIOs and CFOs love Infinidat in this video.
