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White Paper
Storing the Future
Abstract
Even 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 a business operates.
To reach those goals, there are several variables that must be tuned
perfectly to achieve the optimum results at the lowest cost. These
variables are availability and reliability, performance, manageability,
application ecosystem integration, and platform architecture.
This paper outlines a way to think about storage that can solve
these problems today and long into the future. It outlines a storage
platform that is designed for exceptional performance and extremely
high reliability, with massive amounts of usable capacity, all at the
right price.
Humanity’s data footprint is exploding. Big Data, analytics, cloud, the Internet of Things,
social media and more are causing its exponential growth. In every industry and every size
organization, storing and retaining data presents the same challenges: it is too expensive,
fundamentally unreliable, difficult to maintain consistent exceptional performance, and
consumes too much floor space and energy. Modern storage infrastructures have become
a patchwork of point solutions, trade-offs and compromises.
Even 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 a business operates.
To reach those goals, there are several variables
that must be tuned perfectly to achieve the
optimum results at the lowest cost. These variables
are availability and reliability, performance,
manageability, application ecosystem integration,
and platform architecture.
Simply put, INFINIDAT was founded to solve these
problems. We have developed a storage platform
that provides exceptional performance and extremely
high reliability, with massive amounts of usable
capacity, all at the right price.
Architecture Matters
Organizations are often conflicted between protecting
their valuable data (which increases cost) and
lowering the cost of storage due to the use of older
and inefficient legacy data protection schemas.
Most vendors will use variations of RAID technology
in order to balance data protection efficiency, media
density, performance, fault tolerance, rebuild times
and, of course, cost. Customers are left with the
responsibility of choosing and compromising
among the few suboptimal solutions and
architectural options.
In addition, power, cooling and data center footprint
are clear variables that continue to be a cost drain,
regardless of the advent of denser and lower-power
consumption technologies, e.g., NL-SAS and SSDs.
The reason behind this is that, regardless of the
known benefits of newer architectures, clients
continue acquiring multi-rack and multi-vendor
solutions, ultimately negating the cost-saving
benefits of such technologies.
Architecture from INFINIDAT means breakthrough
innovation. We understand that it is not enough to
have the best performance and reliability, or the best
integration with applications. The
architecture of the system has to
unify the organization, whether
the organization has SAN, NAS,
mainframe, or object-based
storage. The architecture has to help support the
goals of the organization, which include protecting
data, growing capacity and scaling performance, all
while lowering the operational costs associated with
power and floor space. InfiniBox, with up to 2PB of
usable capacity and running at optimal performance,
consumes a maximum of 8kW of power (or as low
as 4 watts per usable TB).
Within the InfiniBox architecture, industry-standard
components are coupled with breakthrough software
to deliver a solution that increases capacity and
resiliency on a single floor tile, and delivers efficient
in-memory data management, flash-optimized
SSD and hot spot-free automatic data dispersion.
Consequently, this dramatically reduces the floor
space required for large amounts of capacity and
performance — from as many as 10 racks to just one
rack. The InfiniBox system realizes the green factors
of reduced power consumption that are promised
yet never delivered by incumbent storage providers.
To change the economics of the architecture, all
software features and functions are included at no
additional cost, and all new functions can be added
as simple nondisruptive software.
Availability and Reliability
InfiniBox is designed to be
installed once and then never stop
serving data for its entire lifetime.
All code updates are performed
nondisruptively online, and there is no conceivable
maintenance operation that would ever require
taking the system offline. As such, InfiniBox is rated
for 7 nines of availability versus 5 nines for incumbent
technologies. 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 negative impact
on business operations. InfiniBox eschews traditional,
customized hardware and dual-controller data path
and data-unaware RAID protections, in favor of a
triple-redundant power and data path.
The INFINIDAT Storage Architecture™ is a patented
and proven data protection architecture that employs
wide data dispersion and double-parity protection. It
implements a log-structured-write approach, massive
parallel usage of resources and small 64KB data
blocks, allowing InfiniBox to always write sequentially
on a spinning disk, regardless of the host I/O
data patterns. The INFINIDAT Storage Architecture
eliminates disk hot spots and any need for tiered data
policies or performance tuning usually seen in legacy
storage platforms. The INFINIDAT Storage Architecture
provides the foundation for handling petabytes of
usable capacity under heavy production workloads,
delivers ridiculously fast (15 minutes or less) selfhealing mechanisms for simultaneous double-disk
failure scenarios, and yields consistent performance
under any conditions.
The INFINIDAT Storage Architecture also includes a
high-performance snapshot and replication engine.
This capability allows unlimited snapshots per volume
across any protocol, with absolutely no impact
on performance whatsoever. Unlike traditional
systems that take hundreds of milliseconds to
take a snapshot, which temporarily slows down
performance, INFINIDAT, with its patented timestampbased snapshot mechanism, supports very high
snapshot rates with no locking of shared cache
and therefore no performance impact.
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.
Performance
InfiniBox delivers consistent
exceptional performance and low
latency by using a few patented design
principles. First, all InfiniBox nodes are
active and service workloads in parallel in a grid-like
approach. Second, InfiniBox employs a massive
transparent cache that accelerates I/O. All data is
broken into granular objects, and a couple of billion
of 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
across all drives in the system, effectively parallelizing
I/O across a large number of components.
InfiniBox is designed to overcome the inherent
challenges of incumbent storage products where
performance, capacity and resiliency are always
unbalanced:
Case #1: All flash array vendors focus on providing
high levels of performance, but at the cost of
implementing inherently complex and inefficient
space reclamation techniques. For these storage
platforms, cost and reliability are tremendous
inhibitors, and the ultimate capacity footprint they
can provide continues to be a fraction of the real
capacity needed in the data center.
Case #2: Legacy high-end disk arrays use a brute
force approach to serving the storage needs of
high-performance I/O and capacity. Virtualization
technologies found in these legacy arrays group
together a large number of drives in a global cache
to serve the performance needs of the enterprise.
Because of this approach, complex manual tuning
techniques are brought to bear when performance
needs are not met, effectively Band-Aiding the
performance needs of the organization.
Case #3: Storage platforms that solely focus on
a software approach (e.g., SDS) do not prove the
predictability of the performance, reliability or
availability of the underlying hardware, making
themselves vulnerable to failing to meet
enterprise-class requirements.
Density
InfiniBox supports up to 2PB of
usable capacity in a single 42U
cabinet with no compression/
de-duplication required, which is more than four
times the capacity of incumbent solutions (see below).
Manageability
InfiniBox offers a clean, simple
and comprehensive RESTful API,
allowing customers to quickly and
efficiently manage InfiniBox systems. The InfiniBox
API enables our customers to have full access to
the features and functions that the INFINIDAT team
uses for internal purposes, from our simple-to-use
HTML-5-based graphical user interface to our
cross-platform command line interface.
InfiniBox is driven by simplicity, which allows us
to deliver intuitive, zero-training, efficient storage
management. InfiniBox can configure natively thin
provisioned-volume and file-system sizes starting
at 1GB, up to a maximum of the system’s capacity
or anything in between in 1GB increments.
Enterprise Competitor
INFINIBOX
INFINIDAT Difference
5X capacity
per rack
1/2 the power
VS
100X better
resiliency
2PB/One Rack, 8KW, Seven 9’s Reliability, Multi-Protocol
2PB/Many Racks, 16KW+, Five 9’s Reliability, Single Protocol
Application Ecosystem Integration
Cost
The team at INFINIDAT knows that applications
create the data that drives your organization.
Integration with the applications to provision and
manage the data, for example VMware or OpenStack,
enables efficiencies to be realized throughout the
organization. Application administrators can manage
their environments within their existing application
platforms — cutting down
on the time to learn and
deliver solutions within
their environments. 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 a
costly and complex third-party tool.
InfiniBox reduces capital cost
by an average of three times compared
to storage incumbents. The base price
includes all software features and three
years of 24x7x365 service. InfiniBox also
runs exclusively on off-the-shelf hardware. By
eliminating long hardware development cycles,
InfiniBox always ships with the latest hardware
and the best price-performance ratio.
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 (see below).
TCO — 3-year analysis
2.6x
CAPEX
INFINIDAT
Competitor
OPEX
Competitor
8.7x
INFINIDAT
INFINIDAT
Competitor
$ millions
2.4x
3 Year Solution TCO
Summary
Innovation in storage companies is difficult under the
best of circumstances, because the margin for error is
so small and the consequences of failure are so great.
Over the years, the INFINIDAT team has established a
track record of game-changing storage technologies
that have changed the course of the storage industry
and created enormous value for customers.
We surround the core development organization with
an automated 100PB QA lab, where every component
is tested and every system is burned in for a month
before delivery to customers. We believe it is the
largest and most advanced QA lab in the industry,
and we made this investment to ensure the highest
level of product quality for our customers and to
avoid the possibility of ever doing postmortem QA
in a customer environment. And we surround our
engineering organization with an exceptional preand post-sale customer care team that provides the
support and professional services that demanding
enterprise customers expect from their technology
partners.
We at INFINIDAT believe that our architecture and
our innovation model are the future of enterprise
storage.
35 Highland Circle, S304
Needham, MA 02494
T 1.855.900.INFI (4634)
[email protected]
www.infinidat.com
© INFINIDAT 2015