The INFINIDAT InfiniBox storage system is an evolution of architecture from the Israeli-American company headed by Moshe Yanai, drawing upon experience learned in delivering EMC Symmetrix and IBM XIV systems previously. The InfiniBox has models that provide storage with disk drives and DRAM and Flash as cache. The system utilizes a three controller architecture with up to eight drive enclosures. The controllers are interconnected using InfiniBand with RDMA access between them.
The InfiniBox not only supports block storage but also includes NAS functionality with an INFINIDAT developed file system using the same underlying storage functions.
InfiniBox also supports mainframe attachment with models that have FICON interface cards rather than Fibre Channel but otherwise use the same hardware and underlying system software. Additional mainframe-specific software is included for those models.
While a notable design point for InfiniBox has been to utilize HDDs along with DRAM caching, in June of 2021, InfiniBox announced new SSD models focused on the most performance demanding workloads. These models, called InfiniBox SSA, include the same features and functionality of the traditional Infinibox models, however they replace HDDs for SSDs, and currently file support is not offered. Like the standard HDD-based models, neural caching with DRAM is still utilized, however the secondary SSD cache is no longer necessary, as the SSA models utilize a full SSD backend.
In 2024 they updated the controller node with AMD EPYC, 64-core and PCIe-5 bus architecture. This gives the new G4 models a claim of 2x performance boost. Also included is a small footprint InfiniBox SSA G4 F1400T. This model requires 14RU and starts at 155 TB with usable capacity at 387TB.
The design philosophy for all InfiniBox models is for a very highly available system and uses an N+2 redundancy for toleration of failures. The architecture of the storage functionality is to deal with data as 64K sections and a 14+2 RAID groups where sections are written sequentially as logstructured across the 14 data devices.
INFINIDAT InfiniBox Product Review Includes:
- Overview
- Highlights
- Usage
- Architecture Deployment
- Futurum EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
- The Futurum Group’s Opinion
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