Background

The storage market is the most competitive that I’ve ever seen. While enterprise sales cycles are unusually elongated, and the market is stuttering forward in fits-and-starts, innovation continues unabated. Nearly any solution currently offered by the top five storage vendors can be deployed without regret – there’s no dog in the bunch. As a result, it’s a difficult market to stand out in.

Infinidat has made its name on delivering a robust enterprise storage solution that provides stellar performance, multi-petabyte capacity, and cyber-resilience features designed to address a broad range of mixed application workloads. As a result, the company is finding strong success, with its most recent quarter showing some of the best growth in its twelve-year history.

Infinidat continues to drive innovation forward. Earlier this month, it unveiled its new InfuzeOS Cloud Edition and introduced new cyber-detection capabilities to its existing InfiniSafe solution. Let’s look at what was announced.

News: InfuzeOS Cloud Edition

Enterprises today live in a multi-cloud reality. Nearly every large IT organization has resources spread across one or more clouds, mixed with on-prem infrastructure. On-prem infrastructure may be wholly owned and managed by the enterprise, or it may live on-prem in a consumption-based as-a-service model (such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers with its GreenLake portfolio). It’s complex.

The most challenging part of managing workloads across cloud boundaries is managing storage. It’s not enough to repeat the cliché that data has gravity because that only touches on a piece of the story. Instead, IT organizations struggle to navigate the diverse set of management models and capabilities inherent in the different solutions as they do in moving the data itself. Vendors such as IBM, Nutanix, and VMware each offer cross-cloud management solutions to help simplify managing workloads and data across cloud boundaries, but, where storage is concerned, there are still gaps.

Storage vendors are beginning close that gap, enabling their storage software to be used in the public cloud. This is a significant trend, as it allows IT administrators to have a single set of capabilities and management experiences spanning multiple environments. NetApp has found success with its NetApp ONTAP for the public cloud. Pure Storage offers its Cloud Block Store. Last week Dell Technologies announced its new APEX Cloud Storage. Infinidat is also here with its new InfuzeOS Cloud Edition.

Infinidat’s flagship storage offering, InfiniBox, is powered by its InfuzeOS operating system. InfuzeOS is the brains behind the goodness delivered by InfiniBox. Within InfiniBox, InfuzeOS provides an audacious 100% availability guarantee and features zero-impact snapshots, synchronous and asynchronous replication, supports an active/active controller architecture and multi-petabyte scalability, and contains a bevy of cyber-resiliency capabilities.

InfuzeOS Cloud Edition brings much of the goodness of Infinidat’s InfiniBox to the public cloud, with a seamless management experience for the storage administrator. It’s designed to supplement on-prem Infinidat storage, with use cases identified for disaster recovery, business continuity, and cloud backup. The new offering should also help with DevOps and application integration, proof-of-concept development, and supplement on-prem storage for burst and storage tiering.

The first release of InfuzeOS Cloud Edition is available for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a single-node InfiniBox configuration. The InfuzeOS Cloud Edition also expands Infinidat’s activities as an AWS Partner Network member, including its existing AWS Outposts Ready designation.

News: InfiniSafe Cyber Detection

Infinidat brings its cyber-resiliency capabilities to market under its InfiniSafe branding. As Infinidat describes it, InfiniSafe technology provides a multi-layered cyber stack for creating cyber-resilient environments with Infinidat’s InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA platforms. 

Earlier this month, Infinidat unveiled its new InfiniSafe Cyber Detection, which enhances Infinidat’s cyber-resilience and capabilities by enabling IT administrators to detect ransomware and malware attacks with up to 99.5% accuracy. Further, the new offering enables new instantaneous recovery of data from known good snapshots on an Infinidat InfiniBox or InfiniBox SSA platform.

The unique element of InfiniSafe Cyber Detection is how it detects potential ransomeware and malware. Infinidat’s new cyber detection technology performs continual deep scans of block, file, and database stores within InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA snapshots. It does this using an AI-based scanning engine that validates the integrity of the data under store. 

When a potential attack is identified, InfiniSafe Cyber Detection provides forensic reporting to the administrator and offers critical insights into where the compromised data may have originated. The administrator can then quickly recover to normal business operations, as the InfiniSafe technology will also let the administrator know which snapshots contain known-good data. This is a powerful capability.

Analysis

Infinidat isn’t a public company, which only allows for limited visibility into its overall business. Infinidat is, however, a company that doesn’t have a problem touting its success. The company announced in April of this year that it achieved one of the highest growth rates in company history, growing bookings in Q1 2023 by 59% year-on-year, along double-digital top-line revenue growth. The company is also profitable.

To contextualize Infinidat’s growth, none of its publicly traded competitors reported bookings growth of nearly 60%. Only Dell Technologies and Pure Storage reported double-digit revenue increases, with Dell reaching 10% growth. So Infinidat is growing faster than the market, which is exactly what you want to see in a company of its class.

Infinidat’s momentum directly results from delivering solutions that meet the requirements of the most demanding IT environments. In addition, the company’s relentless focus on cyber-resilience and availability are second-to-none across the enterprise IT storage landscape. This is a focus that clearly resonates with its customers, and its new InfiniSafe Cyber Detection will be very well received.