Infinidat Is a CIO’s Dream for Innovative Enterprise Storage with Powerful Business Value
Ryan Walker - CIO, Net3 Sept 25, 2024
Enterprise storage is essential to what we do at Net3. We are a backup-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service provider – and we cannot run our business without storage. To put a finer point on it, our business cannot be properly run without fast, reliable, and 100% available storage.
There are other service providers who offload their storage stack to one of the big three cloud providers. However, this is not an option for us. At Net3, we need to have storage under our control – yes, on-premises, and the storage must be predictable, stable, and cost effective.
Over the past two-and-a-half years, we have made significant strides in improving Net3’s data infrastructure, which is the underpinning of our entire business. Infinidat has been a huge part of it. Net3 has purchased and installed four InfiniBox? storage arrays, to date. Net3 is now using 8 total petabytes (PB) of Infinidat storage.
After evaluating and using storage arrays from other storage vendors, I found that the InfiniBox solution is truly innovative. I cannot say this same thing about most of the other storage arrays on the market from other vendors. But Infinidat sets itself apart through its innovation. It delivers 100% availability, reliability, automation, ease of use, and high performance with low latency.
With the recent release of the InfiniBox G4 solutions, I’m eager to start to get some of those next-generation storage systems and replace some of the arrays that we have had in our data center over the last couple of years.
I am excited that, with the new InfiniBox G4, we’ll be able to double our storage density and make the most out of our data center investments. Not only is it part of the natural progression, but it thankfully also will help curtail data center sprawl.
What’s Under the Hood Matters
Not all enterprise storage solutions are made the same. Of course, there are plenty of what I call “sales machine” storage arrays on the market. What I mean is that they have big names, and the vendors who manufacture them boast big sales numbers with them.
The technology in the “sales machines” has become smaller and denser, but, in general, there is nothing innovative about them. They may have different flashy lights on the front or different face plates, but under the hood, they’re the same thing as two generations ago. For example, they’re active-passive storage controller technology. They have simply become denser over time. They haven’t graduated beyond that too much.
However, Infinidat is different. What I have seen from them is innovative from the ground up.
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Case in point: as part of my hands-on evaluation before buying a new storage solution to save our business from the travails of bad storage, I was once in Infinidat’s U.S. head office in Waltham, Massachusetts, and I went around to the back of an Infinidat rack of InfiniBox storage arrays to pull cables. I wanted to see what would happen. Would it fail? Would I find the InfiniBox to be no better than one of those common “sales machines” that other IT folks buy without doing a careful comparison? While pulling the cables, I did a lot of damage to the InfiniBox. But guess what? The InfiniBox stays running. That’s compelling.
InfiniBox has been a delight. It just works. With its built-in service-oriented automation, we don’t have to do anything to it. It’s incredibly reliable. And when we need more capacity, the InfiniBox platform allows for flexible consumption of storage. A key challenge that Infinidat solved for us was our need for highly reliable and highly available storage in a consumption model that would grow as we grow. The business value of Infinidat’s storage solution is well worth it.
For our infrastructure-as-a-service offering, we back up to the InfiniBox using Veeam. And those backup repositories are protected using immutable snapshots for cyber storage resilience. For us, it’s significant for our customers to know that there is an air gap between their backups and the rest of the world.
Availability Is Mission-Critical
Uptime is core to Net3’s business. When I joined the company in January of 2022, Net3 was using another storage vendor’s storage arrays and was having serious issues, especially around uptime, which threatened the existence of the business. Actually, there were issues across storage, compute and networking. As a result of the disruptions to the infrastructure-based service, the company was losing customers.
We switched to Infinidat for storage and to Cisco for networking and compute. Since then, we have not had any issues. Every piece of what runs in the background of our service offerings has been improved in the two-and-a-half years that I've been the CIO of Net3. It’s a credit to my team. I give them recognition for a remarkable job.
Switching to Infinidat’s InfiniBox solution brought peace of mind. It has given our Net3 salespeople the confidence to sell our company’s backup-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. The impact of Infinidat’s technology has been huge.
We wouldn’t be where we are as a company without Infinidat. I cannot reiterate it enough that I only wish we had moved to Infinidat sooner.
Additional Information:
About Ryan Walker, CIO at Net3 - Ryan Walker is the CIO of Net3, a leading clouding service provider (CSP) in the United States. Walker was recently named a Top 10 CIO of 2024 by the IT industry publication CIO Review for his transformative use of enterprise storage to support his CSP’s business.