Overview

Unlike other major storage vendors, Infinidat did not rush into the all-flash market. Its original InfiniBox systems – which remain on the market — use a mixture of hard disk drives, DRAM and flash as cache. Because it serves most I/O requests directly from DRAM, Infinidat’s hybrid InfiniBox models can outperform many competing all-flash systems. InfiniBox also uses a machine learning caching algorithm called Neural Cache to increase caching efficiency and overall performance. InfiniBox utilizes a three controller architecture with up to eight drive enclosures. The controllers are interconnected using InfiniBand with RDMA access between them.

Infinidat kept that design for InfiniBox from its 2015 launch until June 2021, when it brought out InfiniBox SSA flash-only models aimed at mission critical workloads that demand the greatest performance. InfiniBox SSA included the same enterprise storage features and functionality of traditional InfiniBox storage but replaced HDDs with SSDs. The SSA uses two tiers: DRAM cache and TLC SSD back-end storage. InfiniBox SSA still uses Infinidat’s Neural Cache with DRAM but the secondary SSD cache is no longer needed because of the full SSD backend.

Just 10 months after the InfiniBox SSA launch, Infinidat added InfiniBox SSA II with improved performance and cyber security features. Infinidat positions the InfiniBox as tier 1 storage and the InfiniBox SSA II for tier 0 workloads requiring low microsecond latencies.

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