Lenovo Group Ltd. today announced that it’s acquiring Infinidat Ltd., a venture-backed provider of data center storage systems.

The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. Infinidat previously raised more than $350 million in funding from TPG, Goldman Sachs and other investors. The company achieved profitability in 2022.

Infinidat offers two storage array families known as the InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA lines. The former product series combines disk drives with flash while the latter is based on an all-flash design. The InfiniBox SSA line, the fastest of the two, promises to process data input and output operations with sub-millisecond latency.

Both product families are powered by an internally developed storage operating system called InfuzeOS. Infinidat says that the software streamlines data management tasks in several ways. 

InfuzeOS includes a caching mechanism called Neural Cache that is powered by artificial intelligence models. It stores a company’s most frequently accessed files in DRAM, which is 1,000 faster than flash, to speed up data retrieval. The feature also reduces the amount of time required to write data to storage by skipping some of the steps usually involved in the task.

To mitigate the impact of hardware failures, InfuzeOS creates multiple copies of each record and spreads them across several storage drives. If one of the drivers fails, the data inside is not lost because the other copies are still available. Infinidat says InfuzeOS can also avoid data loss when multiple drives fail at once. 

Last year, the company refreshed its product portfolio with a new generation of arrays called the G4 series. The lineup includes an upgraded version of all-flash InfiniBox SSA with up to 16 petabytes of capacity. There are also new InfiniBox G4 hybrid storage systems that have a maximum capacity of 20 petabytes.

Alongside its hardware, Infinidat provides a data protection service called InfiniGuard. It enables companies to create immutable backup copies of their data that can’t be modified or deleted by ransomware. For added measure, administrators can isolate those backup files from the corporate network.

Lenovo is a major supplier of entry-level and midrange storage arrays. According to the company, the acquisition of Infinidat will grow its presence in the high-end data center storage segment. Additionally, Lenovo expects the startup’s software research and development capabilities to augment its in-house engineering programs.

“Infinidat’s expertise in high-performance, high-end data storage solutions broadens the scope of our products, and together, we will drive new opportunities for growth,” said Greg Huff, chief technology officer of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group.

Alongside storage equipment, Lenovo’s infrastructure group makes a range of other data center products. The list includes servers optimized for AI workloads. Those machines are powered by Neptune, a cooling system that uses warm water to dissipate the heat generated by graphics cards, central processing units and the attached memory.

Lenovo’s storage, software and services business increased its revenue by 35% last quarter on a year-over-year basis. Sales of Neptune-powered servers grew 48% in the same time frame.

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