Infuze OS S3 comes of age

It’s been seven months since Infinidat launched its on-premises S3-compatible object storage service with InfuzeOS 8.5.  With the latest InfuzeOS  8.8 update adding key capabilities and building on growing enterprise demand for secure, high-performance S3 storage on-premises, we talk with Ishraq Ahmed, Senior Product Manager for File & Object Storage at Infinidat, a Lenovo company, and ask where is S3 in InfuzeOS heading next?

“If you’ve followed our file storage story, you already know the pattern: we don’t chase every feature checkbox in the industry.  We wait until Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise customers tell us, clearly and repeatedly, what they actually need, and then we build it right rather than building it first.  Object storage was no different.  Our customers running S3-based backup targets, cloud-native applications, and data lakes on public cloud or third-party appliances kept asking the same question: “why can't we get that same S3 interface, with the same InfuzeOS reliability, availability, cyber resilience, and performance I already trust for block and file, on-premises?” So, we built it.”

“So, why on-premises S3, and why now? Quite simply, S3 has become the common language of object storage. It may have started with AWS, but today everything from backup software and analytics platforms to AI/ML pipelines and archiving tools is built around it.  Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise customers didn’t want another proprietary object interface bolted onto their enterprise storage environment.  They wanted the same API contract they already use in the cloud, but running in their own, secure data centres, under their own control, with their own data sovereignty, governance, and latency requirements.”

“InfuzeOS S3 gives them exactly that: a fully S3-compatible service running natively within InfuzeOS, backed by the same Neural Cache architecture and the same 100% availability, performance, and cyber guarantees that our customers leverage for their block and file deployments.  Since the S3 object, block, and file protocols are all native to our InfuzeOS and is so easy to deploy, many of our customers are using all three protocols on their InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA G4 solutions.”

“Anyone who has run object storage at scale knows the dirty secret of the S3 API: LIST is brutal. It's a metadata-heavy operation, and most object storage platforms – especially ones built by bolting an S3 gateway onto a general-purpose backend – start to buckle once bucket sizes climb into the hundreds of millions or billions of objects.  Listings slow to a crawl, backup jobs time out, and applications that need to enumerate objects quickly simply can’t.”

“We took a different approach.  InfuzeOS S3 is built on Infinidat’s metadata engine, rather than layered on top of a generic file system or a bolted-on database, so we’ve been able to push LIST performance to more than a million objects listed per second.  That’s not a number pulled from a lab corner case.  It’s the kind of performance that makes a real difference for enterprise backup software doing catalogue verification, for data pipelines scanning buckets before a job kicks off, and for any application that treats “list my objects” as a routine, not exceptional, operation.”

“For enterprises, one of the biggest jobs for object storage is as an immutable backup target. And when it comes to backup, proof matters. InfuzeOS S3 is compatibility-certified with both Commvault and Veeam, including support for Object Lock and retention. That means large enterprises can use an InfiniBox as a trusted S3 backup target, while keeping their data on-premises – with predictable performance and without cloud egress or API throttling to worry about.”

“The next milestone is in our latest version, InfuzeOS 8.8, where we have general availability of Bucket Versioning and Object Lock for InfuzeOS S3.  Versioning adds an extra safety net, keeping previous versions of objects so they can be recovered if something is accidentally overwritten or deleted. It’s a pretty fundamental piece of the data protection puzzle – and an important building block for Object Lock.”

“Object Lock is where things get interesting for cyber resilience.  We’re delivering both Governance and Compliance modes, so customers can choose the right posture for their environment: Governance mode for teams that need flexibility with privileged override capability; and Compliance mode for environments where not even an administrator can shorten a retention period or delete a locked object before it expires, satisfying strict regulatory and audit requirements.  Alongside that, we’re adding Legal Hold, so objects can be preserved indefinitely, independent of any retention timer, whenever litigation or an investigation demands it.”

“Put together, Versioning, Object Lock, and Legal Hold turn InfuzeOS S3 into a true immutable, tamper-proof backup and archive target; not just S3-compatible in name, but ready to stand in for ransomware-resilient, compliance-grade object storage wherever a customer needs it.”

“One of the use cases that has genuinely surprised even us is manufacturing.  A Global Fortune 500 technology manufacturer has deployed InfuzeOS S3 to support their global factory applications, the kind of environment where object storage isn’t an afterthought for archival data, but an active part of the production process, ingesting and serving data generated on the factory floor itself.  It’s a good reminder that once you make an S3-compatible interface fast and reliable enough, applications show up in places you didn’t originally design for.  Backup and data protection may be the obvious first wave for on-premises object storage, but it's rarely the last.”

“With S3 we’re following much the same playbook as we did with NFS and SMB: start with a strong, fully compatible core, listen to what enterprise customers actually need, and then keep building.  That approach is already paying off, with strong metadata performance and Commvault and Veeam certifications helping establish InfuzeOS S3 as an enterprise-grade storage option.”

“Now, with Versioning, Object Lock and Legal Hold, it’s even better suited to immutable, compliance-focused data protection – and with manufacturers already putting it to work on the factory floor, it’s clear that backup is just the beginning of where InfuzeOS S3 can go.”