M.R. Pamidi, Ph. D.| Srini Chari, Ph. D.
Nowadays, everyone is talking about Generative AI and its promise to fundamentally transform many industries, from Retail to Healthcare to Manufacturing to Financial Services. The critical role of IT infrastructure should be discussed more in the industry, especially the less glamorous part of the IT stack, namely, Data and Storage.
As organizations gather, process, and store larger datasets from all sources, such as sensors, instruments, log files, and so on, their workloads are becoming more compute- and data-intensive. Traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) is converging with AI (Figure 1), including Generative AI. It places similar extreme management, performance, and scale demands on IT infrastructures (particularly Storage) to the point where the rapidly growing Generative AI workloads need an HPC infrastructure.
Figure 1: The Convergence of HPC with AI
By using proven HPC storage software and systems for AI deployments, organizations can reduce data costs, consolidate compute and storage siloes, simplify system administration, improve efficiency, and more. But they must also ensure security, affordability, performance, scalability, compliance, flexibility to manage service level agreements (SLAs), support different configurations on-premises and in multi-cloud environments, and more. Infinidat has incredible promise to deliver a significant ROI to its clients in these situations.
About Infinidat: Delivering Innovative High-Value Storage Solutions
We recently met Eric Herzog, Infinidat’s CMO, at the Flash Memory Summit in California. Founded in 2011, Infinidat is an enterprise storage company headquartered in Waltham, MA, and Herzliya, Israel. In addition to Series A investment, it has received a Series B investment of $150 million from TPG and a Series C investment of $95 million from Goldman Sachs—for a total of $325 million to date. The company claims over 25% of Fortune 50 as its customers, over 140 patents filed to date, and a 100% availability guarantee of its storage products. It has a global presence, with offices and enterprise customers in multiple countries, enhancing its reach and market share. Infinidat’s management team, with storage industry veterans, has a proven track record of success. The team is committed to developing innovative solutions that meet the needs of its customers, with regular announcements that help clients drive innovation and value.
Most Recent Infinidat Announcements Continue to Enhance Innovation and Value
On September 19, 2023, the company announced impressive enhancements to its already-strong product line by adding SSA Express SDS (Soft-Defined Storage) and InfiniBoxTM SSA (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Latest Impressive Infinidat Product Announcements
Traditionally, customers looking to expand their storage infrastructure often are forced to forklift upgrades, which are both expensive and unwieldy. Infinidat’s SSA SDS Express avoids these expensive upgrades by offering Up to 320 TB of usable all-flash capacity and supporting over 95% of existing InfiniBox® systems that can be easily configured into new InfiniBox purchases. This solution expands an InfiniBox hybrid array by allowing customers to leverage the InfiniBox flash layer for performance-sensitive workloads, essentially creating a solution akin to embedding an all-flash array inside the InfiniBox. The non-disruptive, free InfuzeOS 7.3 software upgrade of existing InfiniBox systems has zero downtime, reducing CapEx and OpEx with no new array management interface or need for a second vendor. SSA SDS Express also supports InfiniSafe® Cyber Detection software with a scanning option and storage recovery guarantees.
InfiniBoxTM SSA II offers twice the storage capacity in the same data center footprint, supporting up to 6.635 PB of Storage, about 50% less power (Watts) per effective TB, reduced rack space, floor tile, and power and cooling costs. Increased capacity and performance at scale help consolidate more all-flash and legacy hybrid arrays, resulting in lower storage management costs. The InfiniBox SSA has several guaranteed SLAs: the InfiniSafe Cyber Resilience and Recovery guarantee, guaranteed performance, and 100% availability guarantee. This product also provides scale-up storage systems, adding 60% and 80% partially populated configurations to the existing 100% populated option. Thus, customers can start at a low entry point and scale up as needed.
InfuzeOS with Neural Cache, InfiniSafe, InfiniOps, InfiniVerse, comprehensive enterprise data services, InfuzeOS Cloud Edition, autonomous automation, guaranteed performance, and availability, and InfiniSafe Cyber Resilience and Recovery customers can manage clients’ storage IT operations on a “Set It and Forget It” model.
Infinidat has a growing customer base and includes some of the world’s largest and most demanding organizations. The company’s customers appreciate InfiniBox’s performance, scalability, reliability, as well as Infinidat’s commitment to customer support. We believe this announcement will further strengthen its customer base and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). However, these enhancements will increase the total value of ownership (TVO) and ROI and lower TCO.
Using a TVO Framework to Quantify How Infinidat’s Recent Announcements Can Improve ROI
The TVO framework (Figure 3) categorizes the interrelated cost/value drivers (circles) for Storage solutions by each quadrant: Costs, Productivity/Quality, Revenue/Profits, and Risks. Along the horizontal axis, the drivers are arranged based on whether they are primarily Technology or Business drivers. Along the vertical axis, drivers are organized based on ease of measurability: Direct or Derived.
Figure 3: The TVO Framework for Storage with Cost and Value Drivers
The cost/value drivers for Storage solutions (a circle whose size is proportional to the potential impact on a client’s Total Value (Benefits – Cost) of Ownership or TVO) are as follows:
- Total Costs of Ownership (TCO): Typical costs include one-time acquisition costs for the hardware and deployment and annual charges for software, maintenance, and operations. As described earlier, the latest Infinidat products can lower the TCO.
- Improved Productivity: The TVO model quantifies the value of productivity gains of
administrators, end-users, and the organization. Productivity gains can be significant with the latest Infinidat solutions.
- Revenue and Profits: Faster time to value and more innovation capabilities for clients spur revenues and improve profits.
- Risk Mitigation: A streamlined process and improved governance/security lowers system downtime and minimizes cumbersome iterations in rework.
The TVO and ROI will typically increase with Storage solution size, giving clients even better ROI and Payback in the future as they deploy Gen AI solutions that will require them to manage petascale Storage. It will benefit Infinidat and clients to quantify and monitor ROI from Infinidat Storage solutions as they continue scaling up their infrastructure to handle their most compute- and data-intensive workloads.
