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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