Analyst(s): Camberley Bates
Publication Date: January 17, 2025
On January 16, 2025, Lenovo announced its intent to acquire privately held Infinidat.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Infinidat, a 14-year history
- Infinidat offerings
The News: Lenovo announces its intent to acquire Infinidat, a high-end data infrastructure offering for primary and data protection solutions, building out their storage portfolio.
Lenovo Announced Intent to Acquire Infinidat
Analyst Take: On January 16, 2025, Lenovo revealed its plans to acquire Infinidat, a provider of high-performance primary storage and data protection solutions. Lenovo has established a strong foothold in the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), mid-range, and entry-level storage markets through strategic OEM relationships. This acquisition marks a strategic step to broaden Lenovo’s portfolio for enterprise and cloud service provider (CSP) engagements, enhancing its ability to deliver highly available and performant data infrastructure solutions.
Infinidat’s engineering and proven technology align well with Lenovo’s extensive CIO relationships and the global reach of its sales force. Additionally, Lenovo’s deep supply chain expertise is expected to strengthen Infinidat’s cost position and market competitiveness, further enhancing the value proposition for its customers.
Infinidat ~14-Year History
Infinidat, an Israeli company, was started by Moshe Yanai in 2011. Moshe, a serial entrepreneur, developed one of the first high-end storage systems, EMC’s Symmetrix, and then went on to develop XIV, which was sold to IBM and then a repeat with Infinidat. Thus, with a very strong history of performance and reliability, Infinidat originally focused on enterprise requirements. They succeeded in securing the trust of the large companies, no small feat.
In recent years, Phil Bullinger, also a storage veteran, took over as CEO and established the company on solid financial grounds, delivering profitability to the company. While the company could well remain a strong, substantial offering to the high enterprise market, this move provides an exit for the investors and provides their customers with a positive assurance of ongoing investment.
Infinidat Product Offerings
Infinidat offerings include a primary storage system targeted at the enterprise SAN market. Their original InfiniBox system was designed for spinning disks with SSDs and DRAM used for caching. They further released the InfiniBox SSA models that provide an all-flash configuration. 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 that took them down the market with a 14RU and starting at 155TB with a usable capacity of 387TB.
Their second primary offering is the Infinidat InfiiGuard, a backend storage for data protection systems. The Infinidat InfiniGuard uses the InfiniBox platform and is deployed as a target device for popular backup applications, for use in environments where scaling of capacity and performance and a high degree of reliability are required. InfiniGuard has a capability called InfiniSafe, which allows for operational and remote air gapping, as well as network fencing/isolation, which creates a safe location to conduct forensic analysis of backup datasets to identify a copy of the data that is free from malware or ransomware and can be safely restored.
Infinidat has built out its capabilities with InfuzeOS Cloud Edition expanding Infinidat’s footprint into the public cloud, and creating flexible options for hybrid deployments. Key use cases include remote backups and disaster recovery. As with others, they have expanded autonomous automation with InfiniVerse AIOps and analytics.
Looking Ahead
Lenovo has experienced success in the entry and mid-level storage markets. This acquisition has given them the technology to expand into the broader and more profitable markets of high-end SAN and data protection. They will need to invest in their sales, support, and engineering to capitalize on this investment and continue the excellent work already done by the Infinidat team.
What to Watch:
- Lenovo investments in sales targeting data storage initiatives
- New engineering to optimize Infinidat’s offerings
- Increased competition in the high-end SAN market
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Infinidat Infuses Its OS into Public Cloud, Adds Forensics for Cyber Resiliency
INFINIDAT InfiniBox – Product Review
Author Information
Now retired, Camberley brought over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
