SanDisk Announces InfiniFlash All-Flash Storage System – An Entirely New Storage Category

SanDisk Corporation, a world-leading producer of flash storage solutions, is announcing InfiniFlash, their next-generation storage platform and an all-new storage category that IDC has dubbed as “Big Data Flash”. Built on open source software, InfiniFlash provides huge capacity, extreme performance levels, and outstanding reliability to hyperscale and big data workloads, yet at the same time significantly reducing data center costs and complexity. InfiniFlash is designed to handle diverse enterprise and hyperscale workloads, including Big Data Analytics, Content Repositories and Media Streaming.

IDC indicates that the market for flash-based storage arrays (whether All Flash Arrays (AFA) or Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA)), experienced double-digit growth levels over the past five years. The combined market for this segment was over $11.3B (billion) in 2014. This level of growth is primarily the result of rapid migration to 3^RD platform computing infrastructures that require massive storage, compute power and scalability to meet the ever-growing demands of big data analytics, cloud computing, social media and an increasingly mobile workforce.

InfiniFlash is being offered in three separate configurations, the IF100, IF500 and IF700. This disruptive technology breakthrough delivers 5X the density, 50X the performance, 4X the reliability and consumes 80% less power as compared to legacy hard disk drive (HDD) arrays, and even surpasses the capabilities of existing all-flash arrays that tend to focus entirely on performance. InfiniFlash is able to provide all of these benefits at breakthrough pricing levels for an all-flash hardware solution – less than $1/GB, and less than $2/GB for an all-flash system , without requiring compression or de-duplication capabilities.

According to Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at SanDisk, “Building on our long history of industry-defining innovation, we are very excited to bring our first all flash array storage system to market in the form of a category-defining product that we expect will drive flash into big-data workloads at massive scale. By offering InfiniFlash below $2/GB before compression and de-duplication, we are changing the industry dynamics in favor of dramatically broader flash adoption in new hyperscale and enterprise workloads.”

By segregating compute, switching and storage duties, InifinFlash allows for the use of flash for primary and secondary storage, with new benchmarks for low total acquisition costs and extremely attractive total cost of ownership (TCO). An InfiniFlash system is configured with up to 64 specially-designed and hot-swappable cards, with each card providing an unheard of 8TB of flash capacity. Together, the 64 cards create half a petabyte (PB) (512TB) of raw flash storage housed in a 3-rack-unit (3U) enclosure, which in turn can connect with as many as eight off-the-shelf servers.

InfiniFlash’s modular design supports various operating systems and storage stack products. InfiniFlash also features the award-winning and performance-optimized SanDisk ION Accelerator software suite (from Fusion-io) for block storage management applications. To build scale-out block and object storage workloads, InfiniFlash utilizes the open-source CEPH platform and its ‘flash-intelligent’ design to create enterprise-class data services. This includes development libraries and a software development kit (SDK) that enables customers to optimize their applications for use with the InfiniFlash system to deliver even better efficiency and performance, and to further improve TCO.

Eric Burgener, research director for IDC’s Storage Practice, states that “The creation of the new storage category of Big Data Flash will be a welcome development for 3^rd platform computing customers that are struggling to meet the requirements of hyperscale environments with legacy HD technologies. Big Data Flash solutions consistently deliver sub-millisecond latencies, scale to hundreds of PBs, exhibit enterprise class reliability, availability, and serviceability, and bring the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale to big data application – all at a $/GB price point comparable to that of 15K RPM HDD systems. We believe products like InfiniFlash that offer an aggressively compelling price alternative to current scale-out HDD based architectures currently being used for big data applications, will succeed.”

InfiniFlash is available immediately from SanDisk for customers who are interested. You can view SanDisk’s product page for InfiniFlash here; and you can view the press release announcing InfiniFlash in its entirety here.