UPDATED 12:38 EDT / MARCH 05 2015

SanDisk Infiniflash NEWS

SanDisk shakes up the storage stack with new all-flash storage appliance

SanDisk InfiniflashSanDisk, a company that’s best known for making consumer thumb drives and SD cards, made waves in the storage world this week by entering the market with a flash array that is claimed to be the first to break the $1/gigabyte barrier.

InfiniFlash comes at a much lower cost than similar offerings from mainstream disk system vendors like EMC, Netapp Inc. and others. Driving SanDisk’s strategy is the theory that current storage solutions don’t fulfill the requirements of today’s Big Data-driven organizations. According to SanDisk, customers are desperate for higher density and lower-priced arrays due to considerations such as data center capacity, cooling and power.

SanDisk says the InfiniFlash is meant to be a replacement for traditional disk storage arrays, and will also serve to plug the gap between high-end, high-capacity flash systems, and disk arrays.

InfiniFlash comes in three variations – the IF100, the IF500 and the IF700, all aimed at different-sized organizations. SanDisk says the IF100 is targeted at OEMs, integrators and resellers, while the IF500 and IF700 and for scale-out corporate applications. The IF700 packs in SanDisk’s Accelerator technology that is aimed at the most demanding high-performance applications. Each array comes with slots that fit up to 64 memory cards, and each slot can accommodate up to 8TB, though this will be increased to 16TB in a few months, the company says. This kind of flexibility means that dual power supplies, fans and flash cards can all be swapped out in the event of failure.

SanDisk also says that the price point of under $1 per gigabyte makes it viable for companies to create all-flash data centers for the first time. It will, at the very least, challenge the spinning rust storage market, according to David Vellante, co-founder and principal analyst at Wikibon.

Vellante believes the announcement is evidence that the storage stack is shifting and the traditional disk controller –  which has traditionally been the source of most of the value – is under attack.

“The lower ends of the stack are squeezing the legacy [controller-based] model by combing open source storage function like Ceph with flash at the component level to build low cost, functional solutions,” Vellante said. “Companies like SanDisk are vertically integrating at the bottom of the stack and attacking from below.”

Storage vendors like EMC and Netapp are also being squeezed by cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, which offer storage as a service. The combination of these forces threatens EMC’s and Netapp’s traditional SAN model, he said.  That’s why those companies are shifting their own strategies to embrace software-defined storage solutions.

“Inevitably they will face disruption and they see this coming,” the analyst said. “But there’s only so much they can do.” Vellante expects the entrenched vendors to respond with new product lines around software-defined storage, flash arrays of their own and a greater emphasis on services.

Image credit: MarkusVogt via Pixabay.com


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