WHITE PAPER Managing Data Storage at Scale for Competitive ... · architecture delivers efficient...

WHITE PAPER

Managing Data Storage at Scale for Competitive Advantage

SCALE TO WIN

SCALE TO WIN

WHITE PAPER / DATA AT SCALE 2

SCALE TO WIN

Table of Contents

Abstract �� 3

Architecture Matters �� 4

Performance�� 5

Availability and Reliability �� 5

Efficiency �� 6

Quality �� 6

Simplicity and Manageability �� 6

Application Ecosystem Integration �� 7

Disruptive Price Point �� 7

Service and Support �� 7

Summary �� 8

SCALE TO WIN


SCALE TO WIN

AbstractEven after decades of industry and technology advancements, there still is no universal, integrated storage solution that can reduce risk, enable profitability, eliminate complexity and seamlessly integrate into the way businesses operate and manage data at scale�

To reach these goals, there are capabilities that are required to achieve the optimum results at the lowest cost. These capabilities include availability, reliability, performance, density, manageability and application ecosystem integration�

This paper outlines a better way to think about storing data at scale—solving these problems not only today, but well into the future�

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Humanity’s data footprint is exploding. Big data, analytics, cloud, the Internet of Things, social media and more, are all driving exponential data growth. Today, capturing, storing and analyzing data at scale presents a unique set of challenges for organizations. It is too expensive, fundamentally unreliable, difficult to maintain desired performance, and consumes too much floor space and energy. As a result, modern storage infrastructures have become a patchwork of point solutions, trade-offs and compromises.

Infinidat overcomes these challenges by providing exceptional performance and extremely high reliability. Infinidat offers the greatest storage density and is designed to store massive amounts of data in a single floor tile. It does this at a disruptive price point which enables businesses to be more competitive.

Architecture MattersOrganizations are conflicted on the best way to achieve high reliability and optimal performance when it comes to their data. Infinidat has developed a storage architecture which boasts over 100 patented and patent-pending innovations. It is not enough to simply deliver the best performance, reliability, scale or manageability� The architecture of the system must maximize these characteristics and enable businesses to achieve all their goals, without compromise. Infinidat delivers these capabilities in our enterprise-proven storage array, InfiniBox®. InfiniBox delivers over 1.3M IOPS, seven nines (99.99999%) availability and scales to multiple petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack.

InfiniBox delivers over 1.3M IOPS, seven nines (99.99999%) availability and scales to multiple petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack.

Infinidat has developed a revolutionary storage architecture. InfiniBox is built with the power of three in mind, with N+2 redundancy for all components and a grid architecture that enables superior performance and reliability. InfiniBox consists of industry-standard components that are coupled with enterprise-proven software. The core storage software architecture features an innovative RAID-like algorithm that is scalable and offers a dual-parity RAID schema that solves both the performance and rebuild time challenges of high-capacity drives. Additionally, the architecture delivers efficient in-memory data management, flash-optimized SSD and hotspot-free automatic data dispersion. These capabilities enable InfiniBox to deliver on performance, reliability and scale.

The Infinidat architecture delivers the only true unified storage solution available with support for SAN and NAS protocols. This architecture supports the goals of the organization, including providing data access and availability on demand, growing capacity and scaling performance, all while lowering both CapEx and OpEx.

Power, cooling and data center footprint are additional variables that continue to be a cost drain, regardless of the advent of denser and lower-power consumption technologies such as NL-SAS and SSDs. Organizations’ data centers are literally running out of floor space and power on a global basis, requiring new facilities to be constructed at great cost. The legacy vendors in the market promise a reduction in floor space through consolidation, but in reality, never deliver. InfiniBox delivers as much as a 30:1 consolidation for clients, ensuring consolidation in the data center and room to grow in the future.

The InfiniBox also helps clients further their green initiatives by enabling reductions in data center power consumption—another outcome often promised, yet never delivered by incumbent storage providers. InfiniBox makes these savings possible through consolidation, due to its scale, and its low power consumption of 8kW of power (or as low as four watts per usable terabyte).

Furthermore, in order to change the economics of the architecture, all software features are included at no additional cost, and all new functions are added simply and non-disruptively with a software upgrade.

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PerformanceEvery InfiniBox array delivers consistent, exceptional performance with low latency by using a number of patented design principles. First, all InfiniBox nodes are active and service workloads in parallel. Second, the InfiniBox employs as much as 3TB of DRAM and up to 207TB of flash cache. All data is broken into granular objects and the hottest objects are cached for fast performance. The goal is to serve all reads from the cache while reserving back-end bandwidth for streaming sequential operations. Finally, data is widely dispersed in a sequential fashion across all drives in the system, effectively parallelizing I/O across a large number of components.

Availability and ReliabilityAvailability of data is core to our design. InfiniBox is designed to be installed once and never stop serving data for its lifetime. All code updates are performed non-disruptively online, and there are no maintenance operations that require taking the system offline. As such, InfiniBox provides seven nines of availability, or just 3.15 seconds of downtime per year, versus five nines for incumbent technologies, making InfiniBox 100x more reliable. While N+1 redundancy in incumbent technologies may have been appropriate for some workgroup applications, it is fundamentally unacceptable for modern enterprise applications where an interruption of service can have a profoundly negative impact on business operations. InfiniBox eschews customized hardware, dual-controller data path and data-unaware RAID protections, in favor of industry standard hardware and triple-redundant power.

Infinidat’s storage platform allows virtually unlimited snapshots with no impact on performance.

Unique patents in our portfolio include ways to employ wide data dispersion and double-parity protection, a log-structured-write approach, massive parallel usage of resources and 64KB data blocks, enabling InfiniBox to always write sequentially on a spinning disk, and maximizing the performance and longevity of the spinning disk, regardless of the host I/O data patterns. The Infinidat core platform eliminates disk hot spots and any need for tiered data

CapacityPer Rack

5PB/Many Racks, 16kW+,FIVE Nines Reliability, Single Protocol

5PB/One Rack, 8kW,SEVEN Nines Reliability, Multi-Protocol

VS.10x1/2100x

ThePower

BetterResiliency

5PB/One Rack, 8k

Enterprise Competitor The InfiniBox Difference

Consolidation of Competitive Arrays to InfiniBox

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policies or performance tuning usually seen in legacy storage platforms� The platform provides the foundation for handling petabytes of usable capacity under heavy production workloads, delivers ridiculously fast (15 minutes or less) self-healing mechanisms for simultaneous double-disk failure scenarios, and yields consistent performance under any conditions�

Infinidat’s storage software platform also includes a zero latency snapshot and replication engine. This capability allows virtually unlimited snapshots per volume across any protocol, with no impact on performance, even when the system is 100% loaded. Unlike traditional systems that take hundreds of milliseconds to take a snapshot, which temporarily slows down performance, Infinidat, with its patented processor timestamp-based snapshot mechanism, supports very high snapshot rates with no locking of shared cache and therefore, no performance impact. Additionally, InfiniBox remote replication uses differentials in the snapshot to write the changes to a remote InfiniBox platform. Since Infinidat snapshots are instantaneous, the recovery point and recovery time objectives are some of the lowest in the industry—four-second RPO.

EfficiencyInfinidat systems are 72% capacity efficient and do not use traditional hot spare techniques, delivering always available performance and reliability by using 2% of each drive as spare space. The remaining space is used for parity objects and metadata objects. Infinidat has also developed a compression architecture that allows more data storage on the InfiniBox with absolutely no impact to I/O latency. As a result, the InfiniBox platform is among the most efficient platforms in the market today and always delivers capacity and performance, even when 100% loaded, versus legacy storage systems that can fail to deliver performance and advanced features when 70–80% loaded.

QualityEvery InfiniBox component is tested and burned-in for three weeks in Infinidat’s automated, 120PB QA lab before delivery to a client. Infinidat invested in building one of the largest and most advanced QA labs in the industry to ensure the highest level of product quality. Infinidat’s QA lab uses off-the-shelf hardware which saves on specific hardware validation and increases quality as standard and widely deployed components are used. The lab allows the testing of components at scale and provides meaningful feedback� This is increasingly important as data continues to grow. Through the use of industry standard hardware and testing, Infinidat can deliver the best economics and global support, ensuring clients get the latest proven and cost-effective platforms available.

Simplicity and ManageabilityInfiniBox offers a comprehensive RESTful API, allowing clients to quickly and efficiently manage InfiniBox systems. The InfiniBox API enables clients to have full access to the features and functions such as a simple-to-use HTML-5-based graphical user interface and a cross-platform command line interface. InfiniBox is driven by simplicity, which enables intuitive, zero-training, efficient storage management.

Every InfiniBox is tested and burned-in for three weeks in Infinidat’s automated QA lab before delivery to a client.

InfiniBox can configure natively thin provisioned-volume and file-system sizes starting at one gigabyte, up to a maximum of over one exabyte with thin provisioning, or anything in between.

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Application Ecosystem IntegrationThe team at Infinidat knows that applications create the solutions that drive the success of an organization. The integration of storage and applications to provide provisioning and data management enables efficiencies to be realized throughout the business. Application administrators can manage their environments within their existing application platforms—cutting down on the time to deliver solutions within their environments. For example, with the Infinidat VMware integration, provisioning a VM directly from within vCenter or recovering a single VM from a snapshot is simple, and can be done without having to use complex and costly third-party tools. Our certified support extends from virtualization platforms such as VMware, to some of the largest Big Data environments with SAP HANA, and data protection solutions, such as CommVault.

Disruptive Price PointTo “disrupt” in business is to radically change. Having a low cost is not in and of itself “disruptive,” however, having a low cost and delivering the must-have capabilities that InfiniBox does, IS disruptive. No longer do businesses have to compromise between performance, reliability and scale in order to balance cost. InfiniBox reduces capital cost by an average of three times compared to other storage solutions. The price includes all software features and three years of 24x7x365 service, with a dedicated Technical Advocate (TA). InfiniBox also runs exclusively on off-the-shelf hardware. By eliminating long hardware development cycles, InfiniBox always ships with the latest hardware—delivering the best price-performance ratio in the market.

In addition, InfiniBox density and architecture allow organizations to tangibly generate cost savings in variables such as data center space, power consumption, cooling, orphan capacity, training, professional services and more.

Service and SupportBuying and deploying an enterprise storage array is only the first step in successfully delivering value to a client. To ensure long-term success, service and support must provide a best-in-class experience, not simply for the installation, but for the life of the platform. Infinidat excels here by providing a dedicated TA with every system deployed—at no additional charge. These knowledgeable individuals are responsible for a client’s success with the InfiniBox platform and ensure that everything, from the installation to maintenance and upgrades, goes as smoothly as possible�

Backing service and support is a secure “call home” capability that updates our 24x7x365 global support center for prompt responses to every first call.

One of the biggest concerns clients face is migration of the organization’s data from the legacy platform to InfiniBox. To eliminate these concerns, Infinidat delivers a proven migration service that takes care of the migration of a client’s most precious resource—their data—without interruption to their production environment.

SCALE TO WIN


SummaryThe world is changing at an extremely fast rate these days and one of the core drivers of that change is data. Organizations need it, not only to thrive, but to survive. The faster data is read and the more times it is read, the more valuable it becomes. That means data can no longer be thrown away. Businesses today need to think about storing data at scale. Traditional systems tend to breakdown as they scale, requiring unplanned, and more importantly, unbudgeted purchases. Niche solutions are popping up and creating additional silos of cost, complexity and management inside the data center, adding to the challenges of the personnel and the economics of the organization. It takes a unique storage platform to handle data at scale�

Innovation in storage companies is difficult under the best of circumstances because the margin for error is so small, so in order to ensure success, legacy companies have been delivering the same platforms for decades� Over the years, the Infinidat team, consisting of three generations of storage developers, has established a track record of creating game-changing storage technologies that have changed the course of the storage industry and generated enormous value for customers� In fact, the team has probably developed most of the storage solutions that reside in many organizations’ data centers today.

Infinidat surrounds the core development organization with automated QA and an exceptional pre- and post-sale customer care team that provides the support and professional services that demanding enterprise customers expect from their technology partners�

Infinidat makes new things possible with the power of data. When IT leverages Infinidat’s technology, they can harness amounts of information that were previously impractical. When you become a client, you remove a limiting function in IT that constrains others (information storage capacity and cost). By taking advantage of the Infinidat solution, organizations can enable new business models—many of which will manifest in the future.

WP-COMPADVG-190331-US | © INF INIDAT 2019

SCALE TO WIN | info@INFINIDAT�com | +1.855.900.4634

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