Infinidat comments on why backups are hot

For decades now, there have always been challenges in how data is protected across an enterprise’s compute and storage environment.  As the growth of data accelerates and performance of backups and restores continues to be an ever-greater challenge, we talk to Bill Basinas, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Infinidat for his views.

“I originally cut my teeth in the data management and storage industry in data protection, having spent a lot of time at various companies directly related to backup and recovery.  In a nutshell, the process has evolved but so have the workloads and complexities of these environments, which continue to pose challenges for managing data.  Ultimately, this boils down to two baseline outcomes: Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).  Even with the advances and optimization of the backup environments, the challenge continues to be the ability to restore and recover ever-increasing amounts of new data.”

“In trying to address this, many things have started to shift.  We can talk for days about all the particulars to this, but I want to focus on an area we have seen take off for Infinidat and why this has become such a successful area for our InfiniBox® hybrid storage platform.”

“To net it out, it is really about RTO, but we haven’t forgotten about RPO.  RPO is still the domain of control of the backup admin and/or the application owner and is directly related to how often backups are completed.  That leaves the challenge of RTO: how do you increasingly accommodate the needs of fast data recovery?  This is especially important now with the dramatic increase of all the cyber threats to critical corporate data and the frequency of cyberattacks on enterprises now exceeding >1,650 per week.”

“We have two solutions that excel in this area: InfiniGuard®, our purpose-built backup appliance (PBBA), providing an optimized data storage solution with inline deduplication engines.  I hear you saying that there are a lot of solutions out there that do that.  Yes, there are, but they don’t use an innovative architecture with the performance advantages of an InfiniBox as the backend storage.  Remember, most purpose-built backup appliances were engineered to OPTIMIZE how much you can store on the backend repository.  Some even built specific operating system environments to support this.  The result has been optimized storage performance, which all too often negatively impacts recovery performance.  This is because the use of the backend storage was built to be cheap and deep and didn’t fully focus on recovery performance.  As a result, we settled for “good enough” most of the time.”

“So how did we solve this?  We used our InfiniBox, our hybrid platform, which is extremely well-suited to create a fantastic repository for deduplicated data.  Because of our inherent architecture, this also results in great recovery performance − RTO.  We continually hear this from head-to-head tests our customers do when looking to update their data protection environments.  For instance, one of our global Fortune 500 customers was never able to meet their backup window or restoration time SLAs for their Commvault backup environment.  When they moved to an InfiniGuard, with the embedded hybrid InfiniBox, they exceeded all backup window and restoration time SLAs – some by 2X.”

“Another Fortune 500 customer in Europe, who was very concerned about cyber threats, has deployed InfiniGuard with our award-winning InfiniSafe cyber storage resilience solution.  This customer reduced the full backup window for one of their database workloads to only 30 minutes from 5 hours with their former backup target – a 10x improvement, reduced the backup time for another workload to ONLY 4.75 hours from 18 hours with the other vendors’ product – nearly a 4x improvement, and saw a reduction in recovery time of 97% for full copies.  Winner!”

“But again, data environments, workloads, cyber, and other data security challenges have created requirements to protect multiple categories of data differently.  Encrypted data sets, like databases, etc, are one big area; another is compressed file formats, especially in the fast-growing unstructured data world that is driving AI deployments.  This has led to using different methods to protect data because many critical datasets that are encrypted are also some of the most mission-critical workloads a company has, especially in the world we at Infinidat live in.”

“Our customers want the flexibility to manage their data as they need to put data where they need to protect it, in the best possible way, without compromising the backup performance, all while enhancing the speed of recovery.  Our InfiniBox hybrid platform has won the hearts of our customers in doing just that.  Giving them the flexibility to leverage the InfiniBox directly for both applications and as a target for their backup software, especially where the backup software may be doing deduplication, thus not needed at the storage layer.”

“So why are they loving it?  First, our architecture and flawless capabilities natively built into InfuzeOS™ have proven to deliver performance at scale across almost any workload you put on it.  Yes, it is very horizontal in what it enables our solutions to do and the workloads it addresses, which is why we are so great at consolidating workloads, but that is a separate story.”

“Next, performance, and this is again enabled by our software, but in particular our performance of our file protocols, since in most cases that is the preferred method, or maybe the only interface supported.  All our file protocols, including object protocols, are tightly integrated in InfuzeOS™ and perform exceptionally well, on par with our block performance, in most cases.  Architecture matters – we implement file and object without compromise because it shouldn’t matter if it is file, block, or object, they should all perform, and they do.”

“So how has our protocol support benefited our customers?  Well, with one of our Fortune 500 customers, they replaced 36 competitors’ PBBAs with 20 InfiniBox hybrid arrays using our InfiniSafe cyber resilience and recovery technology.  Not only was the initial CAPEX ½ that of the competition and they saved in just their first year of deployment >$1.5 million in OPEX, but they have met all backup window SLAs and all recovery time SLAs.  The previous vendor’s product never met the agreed-upon SLAs with the application owners.”

“Another Fortune 500 customer for the Veeam backup environment has replaced their previous backup target vendor with 58PBs of InfiniBox.  This customer reduced the data centre floor space and rack space by 75%, got the best price performance from Infinidat compared to all other vendors they evaluated, and loved our White Glove support and service compared to the constant support issues they had with their previous vendor.”

“Last but not least, flexibility, as I mentioned earlier.  We enable our customers regardless of what platform fits best.  We see many customers leverage both the InfiniBox and InfiniGuard to optimize backups across their varying workload data management needs.”

“Our current family of InfiniBoxes, in particular, our F84SH is the preferred choice for customers.  Why?  Mostly because they want a platform that provides a large repository and performs at scale.  The F84SH has 11PB of usable capacity (up to 33PB effective) and performs extremely well, validated not just by us, but by our customers.  The result is much faster backups and restores, and more than enough capacity to handle the needs of any mission-critical workload data protection in a single rack.”

“Even in the cases where customers use InfiniBox as the repository for their backup applications, and because we work closely with the backup app vendors, we can easily leverage their capabilities to have multiple InfiniBoxes configured with their software to scale out the capacity needed for general backup and recovery needs, providing superior overall performance in these environments as well.”

“We have cybersecurity covered, too!  Our award-winning InfiniSafe® technology powers our Next-Generation cyber data protection and recovery capabilities.  We provide solutions that automate and orchestrate all these capabilities across our platforms, from data protection with guaranteed immutability to guaranteed SLA’s on recovery performance as well.”

“On our InfiniBox, we guarantee recovery of any sized data repository in a minute or less!  On our InfiniGuard, we guarantee in 20 mins or less, only because we have to reconnect to a stateless server that powers our deduplication, and that takes a little time to do reloading the OS, networking, etc. To prove our point, we have recorded demos from live webinars (https://info.infinidat.com/Next-Gen_Data_Protection-EN_WebinarRecordingLP.html ) which include our Next-Generation Cyber data protection and recovery capabilities.”

“All of this is backed up (pun intended) by not only our guarantees, but the best “White Glove Service” in the industry.   This is validated by Infinidat being a seven-time Gartner® Peer™ Insights Award winner!  (https://www.infinidat.com/en/news/press-releases/infinidat-recognized-2025-gartner-peer-insights-customers-choice-primary).  Believe them, not us, in how effective our solutions are in helping solve some of the most complex and demanding data storage management, performance, and cyber secure storage needs around the world − and to recover quickly and cleanly!”