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back to article Infinidat decloaks, bulging with a BILLION greenbacks

Symmetrix inventor and serial startup whiz Moshe Yanai has another startup exiting stealth; Inifinidat, which has a funding round and high-enough VC valuation for it to be a unicorn. Infinidata was started up in 2010 by ex-XIV vets with Yanai as a board member and, we’d guess, angel investor. It is kind of re-inventing XIV, …

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  1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
    Meh

    "This is a disk drive array and surely, long-term, disk drive arrays are the new tap libraries and will not store fast-access data or, eventually, near-line data either. Enterprise on-premise arrays will go all-flash; that is what analysts such as the people at Wikibon are saying."

    Yeah, about that . . . wake me up when AFAs have a price per GB that comes anywhere near NL-SAS or SATA. Right now, the sweet spot in price/performance seems to be with hybrid arrays which offer bulk storage on fat, slow drives and a fast flash tier with concomitant storage logic designed to maximize the performance benefits of flash. Contrast this type of design with a legacy storage array which has hybrid storage bolted on (e.g. NetApp FAS or EMC VMAX); those arrays do not make efficient use of flash storage, especially for writes, no matter what the vendors say.

    "A second worry is that hyper-converged systems are attacking the idea of a networked storage array being necessary at all."

    The hyper-converged space is still, you know, converging, with significant concerns about the strength of the overall architecture. Enterprise customers also often have an existing storage infrastructure investment (HBAs, cabling, switches, etc.) and a pre-existing architecture to support it, so slapping in a new, faster array is less disruptive and often cheaper than trying to migrate to hyper-converged. New companies may want to make use of hyper-converged appliances, but I suspect there's a significant addressable market of well-capitalized, profitable companies who would be happy to have a box which plugs into their existing infrastructure and makes everything go faster.

    "A third worry is that on-premises data is going to the cloud."

    This concern is valid, but I think it mainly applies to newer companies, as above, or older companies which don't have data that matters to them. And who knows, maybe Infinidat is targeting cloud providers as well.

    There are multiple large companies still selling large frame arrays and making a tidy bundle doing it, indicating that there's still a profit to be made in this space. Most of the offerings in the space that I've seen have some woeful deficiencies in terms of price efficiency, manageability, and performance, so a fast-moving competitor certainly has an opportunity to steal somebody's lunch.

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    1. JoergH
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      Don't worry, be happy...

      Tom,

      Take a look at the Wikibon article that is referenced in the original story: http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Evolution_of_All-Flash_Array_Architectures

      What they suggest is that Flash will soon be cheaper than HDDs, when you look at it from a multi-year TCO perspective. All of the drivers toward change mentioned in the article are ahppening now, I see them every day already. but companies ARE moving important data to the public cloud. They are also building private cloulds, and leveraging hyper-converged to do it. So, does that mean that storage array sales will dry up over night? Of course not, but it meas that new sales, and "refreshes" will become fewer and fewer over time. So the question is, do you want to enter a shrinking market? Apparently there are some VC's who think that they can get their investment back before the market dries up. We will see if they are right...

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      1. Tom Maddox Silver badge
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        Re: Don't worry, be happy...

        In re: "multi-year TCO," I can well imagine that to be the case, especially when you factor in the cost of power and cooling. However, if you have a hybrid array which de-stages all cold blocks to disk and then idles those disks, your power budget may still be low enough to counter the cost of flash. Not saying that this is the case, just that it could be. I definitely agree that flash offers great potential to improve storage efficiency (dedupe + compression with massively reduced processing time, for example), but is it sufficient to bring flash storage into parity with spinning rust?

        There's also the question of capex vs. opex. Operationally, there's no question that flash is cheaper than conventional hard drives from an operational perspective. OTOH, many vendors offer a tremendous initial discount precisely because they know they'll be making back that discount in maintenance costs, making it easy for a purchaser to go to management with a smaller purchasing cost. Obviously, yes, it makes more sense to go with the product which offers a better TCO, but that's not the way all organizations work.

        Finally, from the perspective of the end goal of Infinidat, maybe they don't even care about the overall marketplace and carving out their niche in it. If they can show that they do a better VMAX than EMC or a better USP than HDS, one of those companies is likely to buy Inifindat, thus handily lining the pockets of the VCs and founders. Thus Infinidat becomes VMAX 4 or whatever.

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  2. FrankFinley

    I agree with Tom

    It's the same argument I've heard for many years regarding tape vs disk. 15 years after everyone said "Tape is dead" it is still orders of magnitude less expensive than disk. It's just not cool any more. Yes Flash prices will fall but so will disk. And it looks to me like Infinidat's architecture doesn't care what's inside. The benefits will be huge because of the "secret sauce" in the way the underlying storage is used - and I trust Moshe's recipes for "secret sauce"

    As to the other trends in the market - the pundits always make it sound like tomorrow everything will be different ("Cloud" was supposed to have taken over traditional infrastructure long before now) and with the explosion in storage growth I don't think the market is shrinking at all. As said in "Spinal Tap" it's just getting more selective. Legacy architectures like VMAX are what will be shrinking IMHO.

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  3. mgrStorage

    Unless they're expecting a massive cache hit rate, or have some unique trick to predict workflow and bubble data up into cache preemptively, I fail to see how 480 7.2k drives are going to deliver 750,000 IOPs. The safe assumption is that this is similar to an Isilon, where they have performance configs and capacity configs, but the marketing is blurring the difference.

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