Infinidat comments on customer-driven innovation

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It's been nearly ten years since enterprise storage solutions leader Infinidat announced Network File System (NFS) capabilities for the InfiniBox® way back in September 2015, when the InfiniBox was primarily a Fibre Channel-based block storage system.   To find out the latest, we talk with Ishraq Ahmed, Infinidat’s File Storage Product Manager about Infinidat's resounding success with Network Attached Storage (NAS) − or rather, with enterprise-grade, high-performance file storage, as it is now referred to by the industry .

“I must be an old-timer because I still prefer to use the term NAS, but I’ll do my best to keep up with the times.  Most customers and prospects I speak to, in my capacity as a File Storage Product Manager for Infinidat, are very surprised when they hear that more than 60% of our global customer base uses file in some form or another, ranging from simple internal IT project shares to multi-petabyte backups for mission-critical workloads.

When it comes to file storage feature sets, unlike other major file storage vendors in the industry, we never aimed for all the bells and whistles.  Instead, we took a measured and needs-based approach, listening closely to what our customers were asking for to support their business needs and high-end enterprise technical requirements.  Even our first foray into NAS with NFSv3 back in 2015 was the result of a few large Fortune 500 enterprise customers encouraging us, saying that the InfiniBox would be a great fit for NAS with our scale and performance.  For these customers back then, NAS was all about NFSv3 only.  But that’s no longer the case.

Fast forward to three years ago, and several more Fortune 500 customers started asking us for SMB support.  There are advantages to being “late” to the game.  For example, we never even bothered to implement SMB version 1 (or CIFS).  Even Microsoft has long advised its customers to avoid SMB1 due to its security issues.  The customers we were speaking to needed SMB 2.x or higher, and so that's what we delivered in 2022.  Shortly thereafter, we added SMB 3.x support with its pre-authentication integrity and encryption, as customers were becoming increasingly security conscious.

Over the last couple of years, InfiniBox File Storage has seen some incredible wins.  A Fortune 500 financial services provider purchased 45 of our largest capacity (F6420) systems over a span of multiple quarters to back up their mission-critical Oracle databases with Infinidat’s InfiniSafe® cyber storage resilience and recovery software and replicate these backups to disaster recovery (DR) sites.  Given that these backups were being encrypted at the source, their large legacy fleet of deduplication appliances from another vendor was no longer a cost-effective or performant solution.  By replacing those systems with InfiniBox systems, this Fortune 500 customer nearly halved the floor-tile usage in the data center, resulting in huge savings in power and cooling. The value of their investments was put to the ultimate test just about six months ago, when an unfortunate scripting error accidentally wiped out a 28TB database.  They were able to recover it instantly from an InfiniSafe snapshot, and due to extremely fast read performance, they were able to copy the data back to the database server and bring the database back online before the start of business the next morning.  Their DR admin told us several weeks later that, thanks to Infinidat, he had managed to save his job.

Earlier this year, another Fortune 500 firm in the auditing and consulting world purchased 12 InfiniBox™ SSA and InfiniBox hybrid systems to replace 25 low-performing purpose-built backup appliances from another vendor.  Our demonstrated performance during the POC phase and the level of white glove support we provided allowed us to win this deal for providing NFS backups for mission-critical databases.  Not only did Infinidat exceed their backup performance criteria, but replacing 25 systems with only 12 InfiniBox systems also saved this customer substantially on Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and ongoing operating expenses or expenditure ( OPEX).

In the vein of listening and meeting our customers’ needs, when an existing customer (another Fortune 500 financial giant) needed to refresh their InfiniBox NFSv3-backed RedHat OpenStack Platform with a newer version of OpenStack that required support for NFSv4.1, our amazing R&D team managed to develop support for NFSv4 in an incredibly short span of a few months.  This was instrumental in convincing this customer to refresh their aging InfiniBox systems with our newest enterprise solution − the InfiniBox G4.  Just to give you an idea of the scale of this OpenStack environment, over 3,000 VMs are created and destroyed on a weekly basis.

The variety of use cases for the InfiniBox file storage solution has far exceeded our own expectations.  Two large, well-known gaming companies have started using InfiniBox systems for SMB shares for their game development platforms in the past year.  Several large hospitals are using InfiniBox SMB for storing clinical patient data and images.  Managed service providers (MSPs) are providing access to InfiniBox NFS shares to their clients.  A Fortune 500 large insurance company is running its container platform hosted by InfiniBox NFS. Several large IT service customers are using InfiniBox NFS for VMware datastores.  

Unlike some other vendor implementations, our file system and NFS/SMB protocols are intrinsic to our InfuzeOS™, and not a “bolt-on.”  Both file system and volume datasets have equal footing and are backed by our bread-and-butter Neural Cache multi-patented technology that provides unmatched real-world application and performance with an ROI of only 11 months.  The days of being just a block storage provider are long, long, long behind Infinidat.”