Infinidat Inc., which raised $150 million last year to build a hybrid storage array, is today announcing version 3.0 of its InfiniBox storage system, featuring improved scalability, inline data compression, integrated performance analytics and full support for the iSCSI storage transmission protocol. Infinidat said InfiniBox now provides more than one million inputs/outputs per second, with sub-millisecond latency on more than five petabytes of effective storage capacity in a single standard 42u rack.

Infinidat was founded by Moshe Yanai, who led the development of EMC’s groundbreaking Symmetrix array in the 1990s. Infinidat set out to trump that achievement with a box that delivers massive scalability at 99.99999 percent availability using a combination of algorithms that evenly distribute data across hundreds of commodity disks. The device features a combination of DRAM, flash and spinning disk storage, which allows data to be allocated to the most appropriate medium depending on urgency.

InfiniBox 3.0 nearly doubles capacity from the previous 2.7 petabytes and adds inline data compression without sacrificing performance, the company said. Compression is an oft-asked-for but often unused feature of disk subsystems because of the performance penalties it extracts.

Developers figured out a way to use a combination of DRAM and Infiniband to all but eliminate performance trade-offs, said Brian Carmody (@initzero), Infinidat’s chief technical officer, in a CUBEConversation video interview with Wikibon co-Founder and Chief Analyst David Vellante (see below; note: Wikibon is a sister company of SiliconANGLE).

“When we have a section of data in memory that’s a candidate to write to persistent storage, our compression engine chooses from a library of candidate compression algorithms and makes a data-aware choice for each 64k-byte section of data, compresses the data and then writes it to the back-end disk,” Carmody said. “There’s no way that data can get to persistent media without being compressed, but by doing it asynchronously outside of that critical path … we get all the benefits of compression without affecting performance.”

Carmody said the compression engine works transparently on workloads of any size. “We want customers to put a heavy workload on it, turn compression off and on and see that the performance is razor flat,” he said.

The company also pulled off some engineering magic to support iSCSI, an Ethernet-based protocol that performance storage makers tend to eschew for performance reasons. But the prevalence of Ethernet in data centers and managed service providers also makes it an attractive medium.

Fifteen years ago Fibre Channel was the only game in town for high-performance storage applications, but technology has evolved, Carmody said. “The fabrics have caught up on the Ethernet side, so we saw an opportunity to update our iSCSI implementation and take it to carrier-grade service levels,” he told Vellante. “We’ve brought iSCSI service directly into our cluster of controller nodes as a first-level peer.” He said the latency penalty is only about one percent and that there’s been no impact on reliability compared to Fibre Channel.

Infinidat claims that InfiniBox is faster than all-flash arrays in real-world workloads, despite the use of spinning disk. It attributes that paradox to patented algorithms that optimize data placement on the most appropriate media, along with the use of large amounts of DRAM and flash.

While all-flash arrays excel in read-intensive environments, most workloads are a combination of read and write operations, Carmody said. “Customers will have a flash appliance for a specific requirement, but they have a lot of more general needs.” he said. “They load those onto our systems and find that they perform as well or better” than all-flash arrays. Support for up to three terabytes of DRAM, up to 200 terabytes of NAND flash and up to 2.7 petabytes of disk in each array helps the process along.

Improved performance monitoring and analysis tools now enable customers to drill down to a fine level of detail for storage analysis and reporting. Enhanced analytics filter on dozens of data path parameters such as input/output source and target, type, latency and application to permit fine-grained management. Storage administrators can look at all the storage flows going to a particular system, tenant or volume, and drill down to observe individual flows from one endpoint to another in the fabric. They can also look at traffic over time in a multidimensional cube format like that used in online analytical processing.

“The system is instrumented so robustly that if you are a nerdy storage architect you have every imaginable data element that you need,” said Chief Marketing Officer Randy Arseneau (@dorkninja).

InfiniBox Version 3.0 will be generally available later this quarter as a free software upgrade for existing customers. Pricing includes all software and three years of maintenance.

Image courtesy Infinidat