Ensuring high availability to mission-critical applications is vital, but it can be expensive and cumbersome. For instance, managing multiple point data gateways for high availability adds significant management overhead and can substantially drive up the costs of the infrastructure. Meanwhile, these legacy solutions create a performance impact that discourages adoption outside of a narrow range of Tier One applications that require the highest levels of availability. Finally, after making the high availability investment, the customer has limited guarantees from the vendor that their high availability solution will work as advertised.
INFINIDAT Always On Guarantee
INFINIDAT’s wheelhouse is facilitating storage consolidation through petabyte (PB)-level scalability, accelerating performance and increasing the availability of storage infrastructure for mid-to-large-sized enterprises. The vendor’s core offering, its InfiniBox array, applies machine learning to get faster performance and better reliability thanks to their HA architecture and fast media recovery (seven nines, according to INFINIDAT). InfiniBox arrays are part of the INFINIDAT solutions portfolio, which includes InfiniGuard data protection, InfiniSync “black box” replacements for three-site replication environments, and Neutrix Cloud services (providing file systems and block volumes simultaneously accessible across multiple cloud storage services, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure).
Historically, INFINIDAT has offered data availability guarantees on a one-off basis to clients. It is now launching its Always On Guarantee program to scale this capability across its entire customer base. The Always On guarantee requires two InfiniBox systems that are configured with synchronous replication in active-active mode, and which are deployed across two fault domains with redundant IP networking between sites. The systems are federated for autonomous failover and apply INFINIDAT’s Witness software (which creates a quorum for the Always On systems) in a third fault domain.
Customers can purchase InfiniBox systems covered by INFINIDAT’s Always On Guarantee through upfront capital investment, “capacity on demand” pay-as-you-grow, and operating expense (OpEx) procurement models. The Always-On systems must be connected to INFINIDAT’s support cloud, and they must be installed and configured per INFINIDAT best practices, for the customer to receive a remedy in the event of a data outage.
In the capital investment model, the customer has paid upfront for the systems’ full available capacity. From a remedy perspective, INFINIDAT offers 10% off of any future product purchase, or an extension of maintenance and service fees for six months – up to a value of $50,000, and redeemable within a year of the data outage. The customer can choose the remedy according to their business preferences. In the “capacity on demand” procurement model, customers start by activating less than the full usable capacity of the system, and later activating additional capacity as needed through the system’s lifespan. The data outage remedy for “capacity on demand” business models offers credit for additional capacity activation equivalent to 50% of the protected data covered by the active-active relationship, or credit toward an extension of maintenance and service fees for six months — up to a value of $50,000, and within a month of the data unavailability. Finally, the operating expense pay-per-use model provides a remedy of 100% discount on one month’s capacity charges, to be applied to the next billing cycle.
StorageSwiss Take
INFINIDAT’s historical focus on consolidating multiple mission-critical workloads onto a centralized storage platform facilitates valuable expertise around data availability. Competitively speaking, the vendor’s focus on providing clear communication about data outage remediation provides a solid foundation in terms of working with a broader range of IT professionals on their data availability requirements. In the event of a data outage, the cost to the organization will remain high despite remediation, but this visibility may prove to be the differentiator for IT professionals seeking confidence in terms of their ability to cost-effectively meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs).
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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