Mainframe storage vendor Infinidat gets $150m
Infinidat, an Israeli company founded by the engineering team behind EMC's Symmetrix and IBM's XIV, started shipping product in 2013. With over 100 PB shipped to multiple Fortune 100 companies, the company feels it is ready to expand its sales and marketing footprint to take on the behemoths of the storage industry such as EMC, HDS and NetApp.
The $150m from TPG, a large capital management group, brings Infinidat's total funding to $230m. The original $80m came from the founder's, who've been quite successful with their earlier ventures.
Why a new high-end array vendor in an industry battered by cloud storage, flash arrays, and scale out object storage? Infinidat offers up to 2 PB of usable capacity - without dedup or compression - in a single 42u rack, guaranteed 99.99999 percent availability - less than three seconds of downtime year - all software included in the base price, with three years of 24 seven on-site service. All for $1 per usable GB.
In addition, the array uses less than 8KW for a fully loaded configuration, much less than current high-end arrays. The company says that the system is also "stupidly easy" to manage. Wheel it in, bring it up, attach, and it is designed to run without downtime until it is obsolete.
That is an offer legacy vendors will be hard-pressed to match. And it comes from a team that defined modern enterprise storage.
The Storage Bits take
The smarter legacy storage vendors have been investing their high-end array profits in new technologies, leaving the market stagnant.
Infinidat's clean sheet design, incorporating 25 years of enterprise experience, makes good use of the latest technologies - advanced erasure codes, low-latency storage stacks and flash memory - with commodity hardware to build low-cost, high-performance, robust and easily managed storage.
A single rack Infinibox can replace a half-dozen racks of VMAX, freeing up space and power for new uses. This is a solution whose time has come.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. I have no commercial relationship with Infinidat.