back to article Leaner, meaner screamer from Infinidat dreamer

Infinidat is tweaking its Infinibox array design to increase its capacity. The present 3U drive trays and 2U controller enclosures will each become 1U trays, enabling an increase from 480 drives to 720 in a rack – a 67 per cent increase. These drive trays hold 60 vertically mounted disk drives. At Infinidat's Herzliya office …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not exactly ground breaking!

    The NetApp E series has been offering the exact shelf (4U-60) configuration for at least 3 years now.

    1. jablowme

      Re: Not exactly ground breaking!

      Yep, that looks exactly like the NetApp DE6600 shelf from the front (once you remove the bezel).

      4U high, 5 trays of disks, 4 disks wide, 3 rows deep.

      Glad to see the NetApp E-Series product line continues to be heavily OEM'd by the rest of the market.

  2. Rob Isrob

    disk trays

    Those trays show 3 lights for each row. Each tray looks like it holds 12 disks, where do you get 20 at? Are they doing front and back? Those trays would be fairly short. That would be 24 disks x 30U to do 720, which makes more sense with the UPS, management and interface? nodes plus controller would bring them to a standard height or less.

  3. XKCD_Fan
    Facepalm

    "We calculated there were 20 drives per tray"

    Based on the lights and the silk screen label it looks a lot like 12.

    Also why not just ask?

    Ala, how many drives does one of these hold?

    1. Rob Isrob

      shelves and height

      In fairness, I think the transfer of info must have been rushed and not a lot of follow-up questions. I'll bet the 720 drives is accurate so working back from there is how they got 20 drives per tray (which is incorrect). It appears obvious that there will be 360 disks out front and 360 disks out back in those 1U trays each of which hold 12 disks. Regarding the 5, 7 controller heads.. .with the drives taking up 30U , the UPS take up 3U, the controllers take up 3U.. 1U service drawer, they have 37U accounted for. Current box is 3U for UPS, 6U controllers, 32U disk, 1U service drawer 42U in total. New box appears to have 5U for additional controllers (and maybe other things). Imagine one of the goals would be N+2 on controller heads. POC is an even better story: "Go ahead and pull cables to two controller shelves." Customer: "We lost a controller." ... "okay, we'll be out next month to fix it."

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "There's nothing to stop Infinidat from growing"

    Except that the enterprise disk market is shrinking for all other vendors.

    Showing growth from 0% market-share is far easier than showing growth to 10% market-share.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "There's nothing to stop Infinidat from growing"

      And except that the enterprise storage market expects synchronous mirror. I haven't read anything about it or plans for it yet. This feature might not be as important in the US as in EMEA. E.g. in Germany you're out in 99.99999% of the deals when you try to sell a high end storage array and you don't offer this one important feature. But even in the US many customers need storage based sync rep for their most important applications, and lacking it will hinder Infinidat to become a really big player in this shrinking market.

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