The storage market is undergoing its own digital transformation.

As data becomes a business driver, customers require dynamic storage solutions that not only incorporate security and disaster recovery functions, but also make the data available for real-time analysis.

“By 2024, 24% of all of the data captured and stored will be real time,” said Eric Burgener (pictured, right), research vice president, enterprise infrastructure practice, at International Data Corporation. “That puts very different performance requirements on the storage infrastructure than what we’ve seen in years past.”

Burgener was one of three storage industry veterans who joined Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a power panel on developments in high-end enterprise storage solutions. Also on the panel were Phil Bullinger (pictured, center), chief executive officer of Infinidat Inc., and Ken Steinhardt (pictured, left), field chief technology officer of Infinidat.

The conversation focused on the changes underway in the storage market and the evolution of enterprise data storage provider Infinidat. (* Disclosure below.)

Customer demands cause storage solution quest for instantaneous response

Today’s data-centric digital world means storage doesn’t only store data, but also must make it accessible to applications, securely and at speed. The demands put new pressure on performance for storage solutions.

“If you go online and try to place an order … if there’s one particular site that is able to give you instantaneous response, you’re more likely to do business there than somebody where you’re going to be waiting. And it literally is that simple,” Steinhardt said.

It’s not only online shoppers that expect an instantaneous response. There is a growing segment of workloads that require very tight tail latencies, according to Bullinger. And they’re the most difficult ones from a storage point of view.

Enterprise storage companies are striving to achieve the elusive zero-latency mark that will enable their customers to provide instantaneous response and gain a competitive advantage. When they arrived in 2012, all-flash arrays transformed the market and quickly dominated the primary storage arena. But despite the trend, Infinidat stuck with disk, arguing that its cached architecture and proprietary algorithms could outperform all-flash arrays. That hasn’t changed with the introduction of the InfiniBox SSA, a low latency, all-solid-state system designed for the most intensive enterprise workloads.

“InfiniBox still does typically outperform all-flash arrays, but usually that’s for average-of-latency performance,” Steinhardt stated, explaining that the company chose to call the InfiniBox a solid-state array as opposed to “merely an all-flash array” because it’s not dependent on a specific technology.

“We can use virtually any technology on the backend. And, in this case, we’ve chosen to use flash,” he said. But the true differentiator between the InfiniBox and its all-flash competitors is the software that provides caching to the front-end DRAM.

The secret behind sub-half millisecond performance and 100% availability

The not-so-secret secret behind Infinidat’s ability to provide consistent sub-half millisecond performance and 100% availability is its triple-redundant architecture, according to Steinhardt. This concept was first theorized back in the 1950s by the “godfather of computer science,” John Von Neumann, but no other company has acted on the idea, according to Steinhardt.

“Amazingly, we’re the only architecture that uses triple-redundant active components for every single mission-critical component on the system,” he said. “And that gives a level of confidence to people from an availability perspective to go with that performance that is just unmatched in the market.”

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 CUBE Conversation. Neither Infinidat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE