You might think a storage company that’s placing big bets on spinning disks would be roadkill in the race to flash storage, but Infinidat Inc. has done a good job of defying conventional wisdom since it was founded six years ago.

Today, the company is announcing $95 million of new investment in a Series C round that values it at $1.6 billion, up from $1.2 billion at the time of its last funding round in April 2015. Infinidat has now raised a total of $325 million.

What’s more, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company says it’s profitable and growing 250 percent a year at a time when the storage market as a whole has been struggling with the shift to all-flash technology.

Infinidat would say that one of the reasons it’s thriving is because it isn’t shifting. It’s betting that there’s plenty of life left in disk storage if subsystems are designed to take advantage of it. “Storage companies have been trying  to drive the future with faster media rather than rethinking the architecture,” said Chief Marketing Officer Randy Arseneau.

Infinidat has done that with an integrated package that combines servers, disk and flash in a single 42u rack that it claims can deliver flash-like performance at a fraction of the cost. Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante called the approach “magic” in this post from last year that goes into detail on the technology. (Wikibon is a sister company of SiliconANGLE.) Founded by Moshe Yanai, the principal architect of EMC Corp.’s breakthrough Symmetrix disk array, the company has assembled a roster of storage veterans and received more than 120 patents. Its architecture relies heavily on dynamic random access memory and machine learning for intelligent data management at scale.

Overselling flash

Arseneau maintained that the reason most storage companies hastened the shift to flash was to maintain high prices and profit margins. “They started delivering smaller, more expensive storage systems and invested in marketing to make the market think everything was moving to flash,” he said.

Although flash provides excellent performance, it’s costly to scale and doesn’t meet the needs of the largest enterprises, he said. Arseneau said vendors have oversold the promise of flash and saturated a market that isn’t ready. “We’re approached all the time by storage investors who have seen their successes being few and far between,” he said.

Wikibon analyst David Floyer has argued a contrary view, forecasting that the cost of flash storage is already below that of commodity hard drives and will soon surpass even high-performance rigid disk. However, Infinidat’s arguments are clearly finding a receptive ear at large enterprises.

“Petabyte-scale data is now becoming commonplace across a lot of enterprises,” Arseneau said. “All-flash delivers good performance, but only in the hundreds of terabytes.”

Nutanix Inc. has done a good job of targeting the middle of the market with its hyperconverged systems, but at the expense of thin profit margins and limited scalability. And he contended that Nutanix doesn’t scale to the multipetabyte size that large companies now demand. “We have fewer customers than Nutanix, but they’re larger customers, and heavily weighted toward big-ticket companies,” he said, declining to name names.

Infinidat intends to invest the new funds in  the development of new products in “adjacent spaces,” Arseneau said. Those include one for the cloud storage market and another focused on data protection. The company is in a limited customer testing with the new products and plans announcements in the first quarter.

Image: Infinidat