Digital business today is defined by the treatment of data as an asset. With new data economies come new demands for storage and data portability across on-premises and cloud-computing architectures. While technology’s service providers are anxious to emerge victorious in this multicloud world, Infinidat Inc. has taken the path less traveled to find a better way to support data by the exabyte.

“As of this morning at least, Infinidat has a hair over 4.6 exabytes of customer data under management, which is just insanely cool,” said Brian Carmody (pictured), chief technology officer of Infinidat. “And I’m not sure if I counted all of the zeroes properly, but it looks like it’s around 180 trillion [input/outputs] served to happy customers so far.” 

Carmody recently sat down with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s roving news desk, for an in-studio special. Carmody, along with a handful of other Infinidat executives and customers, discussed Infinidat’s most recent product launches and where they fit into the company’s immediate roadmap (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Future-proofing new products

The past year has seen significant growth for Infinidat, thanks to expansion opportunities beyond its core markets. While the company’s early traction was in consolidating storage solutions around its InfiniBox appliance for regulated industries, such as banking, Infinidat now sees growth in greenfield applications. Because customers are eager to engage their digital transformations, Infinidat has changed its workload support to meet market demands.

“Once we get into the digital transformation, these greenfield applications, which is most of our new growth, it’s actually all about using your digital infrastructure as a revenue-generating machine for opening up new markets, new opportunities, new applications, etc.,” Carmody said.

These new types of workloads are extremely data heavy, with clients working on self-driving vehicles and even wearables that can detect a heart attack in real time. To that end, Infinidat is embarking on a new roadmap for product rollouts through next year, starting with Infinidat’s Elastic Data Fabric solution. Considered a “shared vision” between Infinidat and its customers, Elastic Data Fabric is a way to future-proof enterprise storage for the ever-evolving needs of a data-centric economy, according to Carmody.

Gluing together the disparate workloads customers run across public clouds and on-prem storage arrays, Infinidat’s Elastic Data Fabric turns it all into a single platform.

“It is a brand new, next-generation data plane. Let’s say, for example, within a customer data center it allows customers to cluster multiple InfiniBoxes together into what we call availability zones, and then manage that as a single entity,” Carmody explained.

Elastic Data Fabric solutions scale from a petabyte up to an exabyte of capacity per data center, he added, noting clients typically have one availability zone per data center and another to span multiple clouds. “The control plane is the ability to manage all of this, no matter where the data lives, no matter where the workload is or needs to be and to manage it with a single pane of glass,” Carmody said.

Infinidat isn’t the only company to boast of a single pane of glass for managing computing resources in today’s era of open cloud and data portability. So what makes Infinidat different? Elastic Data Fabric is application-aware, built on application programming interfaces to better integrate with, say, a VMware Inc. control panel for managing those virtualized environments for a truer single pane of glass experience.

Data migration is the “bane of customers’ existences,” said Carmody, noting that a single migration can last months and cost a minimum of $50,000. “So when we kicked this project off five years ago, our call to action — the kernel of an idea that became Elastic Data Fabric — was to find a way to make it so that the next generation of infrastructure engineers that are graduated from college right now will never know what data migration is — and make it a story that old men in our industry talk about.”

Agility in data and costs

To change the story of data migrations, Infinidat must be agile for its clients. It’s a combination of data metrics for improved monitoring and automation for faster task completion. Building on its initial InfiniMetrics product for computing system insights, Elastic Data Fabric’s software as a service extends metrics to the migrations themselves, auto-provisioning and storage availability zones, to name a few.

“The cloud-based system gives us a lot of great power too. It gives us the agility to provide faster development and rapid enhancement based on feedback and feature requests,” said Doc D’Errico, chief marketing officer at Infinidat. “It also then provides you customizable dashboards in your system, dashboards that we can create very rapidly, giving you advisors and insights into a variety of different things. And we have lots of customers who are already engaged in using this.” 

The added metrics are designed to help system administrators better allocate resources, D’Errico furthered, revealing abandoned data volumes, storage usage, configuration errors such as asymmetric ports and paths, or performance patterns, including abnormal latencies or bandwidth patterns.

“We’re hearing such great stories about the impact on their costs. Like the capacity utilization, reclaiming all that abandoned capacity, being able to put new workloads and grow their environment without having to pay any additional costs is exciting to them. Identifying and correcting configuration issues, getting ahead of performance problems before they occur. Our customers are already saving time and money by leveraging this in our environment,” D’Errico stated.

Also boosting Infinidat’s agility efforts is FLX, a managed infrastructure service also launched as part of the company’s current product rollout. As businesses migrate data to public cloud environments, Infinidat looks to resolve client nostalgia for on-prem control.

“We’ll manage the hardware, and you get to pay for what you use as you need it,” D’Errico said. “You can scale up and down — we’ll guarantee the availability. One-hundred percent availability, and with this environment you’ll get free hardware for life.”

That free hardware will also be continuously upgraded over the course of clients’ contracts, along with data migration services provided. “You’re not going to have to do any of the work. You’re not going to have to pay for additional capital expense and have two sets of hardware on the floor for 6 to  12 months while you do migration and work it into your schedules,” D’Errico said. “We’ll do the entire [data migration] transparently for you in your environment, completely non-disruptive to you.”

As data is being migrated, it’s also being backed up. Infinidat’s disaster and recovery also get an upgrade in the current product rollout, with active active clustering to boost its high availability claims.

“What’s new and different now is we’re extending [high availability] with the ability to do active active clustering, and it’s the real deal.” said Ken Steinhardt, field CTO with Infinidat. “We’re talking about the ability to have the exact same volume now at synchronous distances, presenting itself to both sites as if it were just a single volume.”

The new solution is based on existing synchronous replication and InfiniSnap tech to provide continuous operations and add resilience against site, storage and server failures. While many companies are employing active active clustering, Infinidat looks to also change the economics of this tech. Typically, businesses face a tradeoff between the recovery point objective and recovery time objective, losing either speed, time or money.

“We’re able to break that paradigm for the first time here, and we’re able to now take the economics of multi-site, disaster-tolerant, cluster-type solutions and do it at costs to what are comparable to what most would do for just a single site implementation,” said Steinhardt.

Scaling through software

There’s some heady tech underlying Infinidat’s in-progress product rollout, and the company’s patient perspective on trendy computing architecture led it down a path less traveled. Infinidat differentiates itself in flash storage, choosing not to adopt all-flash appliances in hopes of future-proofing much of its product portfolio.

“We innovated,” said Craig Hibbert, vice president of strategic accounts at Infinidat. “We spent over five years looking at the big picture — what the [InfiniBox] would need today and in the future and how would we arrive there by doing it economically. We use a small amount of flash — 2 to 4% of the total box. Instead of throwing hardware at the solution, we have specific mechanisms nobody else has. We have a tri, which is a multi-value structure to dynamically trace and track all IOs coming into the box.”

Where its competitors may have a shiny all-flash appliance, Hibbert feels this narrow approach limits usability and insights. If you want to upgrade an all-flash box, it can only be done with aftermarket add-ons.

“Their only course of action to adopt new strategies is to bolt on the latest and greatest media,” Hibbert said. “I’ve had a lot of experience at other companies where they’ve tried to shoehorn in new techniques, whether it be a [network-attached storage] blade … or a thin provisioning after the fact. The beauty with InfiniBox is all our protocols work the same way — [Internet Small Computer Systems Interface], NAS block — it’s all structured the same way. That makes performance equal over all protocols and easy to manage via the same API structure.”

The software-perspective on hardware optimization lets Infinidat continue to scale its own business rapidly. When the Israeli company first launched in the U.S., the goal was to grow from 300,000 IOs to 1 million without changing the platform. The company nearly hit the target, reaching 900,000 within the time allotted.

“That’s a massive increase by just software tweaks. What we do is, once the product has gone through its second year, we reevaluate and optimize … and we were able to give a 30% uplift to existing customers with just software tweaks” since autumn 2018, Hibbert concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Infinidat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Infinidat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE