Infinidat Guarantees Cyber Resiliency On Primary Storage

‘We’ve had a 100 percent high-availability guarantee since 2019. We’re now adding two new guarantees: a performance guarantee and a cyber recovery guarantee for primary storage. And it’s available any way businesses consume their storage,’ says Eric Herzog, Infinidat’s chief marketing officer.

Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog

High-performance storage technology developer Infinidat Wednesday unveiled a new performance guarantee as well as what it called the first cyber storage recovery guarantee for primary data to help protect against and recover from ransomware attacks.

Infinidat is expanding its existing guarantee service-level agreement program for data stored on its storage systems, said Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer at the Waltham, Mass.-based vendor.

“We’ve had a 100 percent high-availability guarantee since 2019,” Herzog told CRN. “We’re now adding two new guarantees: a performance guarantee and a cyber recovery guarantee for primary storage. And it’s available any way businesses consume their storage, whether they purchase it, pay a base price plus elastic pricing based on capacity, or full storage as a service where we own the box.”

[Related: INFINIDAT INTRODUCES INFINISAFE: CYBER RESILIENCE FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE STORAGE]

Infinidat’s performance guarantee for its InfiniBox storage platforms starts with an assessment of a customer’s workloads on all-flash or hybrid flash Infinidat storage, with the company then providing a guarantee of latency, IOPs and bandwidth, Herzog said.

“The actual guarantee varies with the applications,” he said. “For some applications, bandwidth is not an issue, while others may be bandwidth-intensive. The assessment is very straightforward. Our services team does it with no charge to the customer or the channel partner.”

On the cyber storage side, data resiliency depends on ensuring there are immutable data snapshots, air-gapping of data from the access to that data, a fenced-in forensic environment, and near-instant recovery to help recover from malware or ransomware attacks, Herzog said. Infinidat already provides the latter three, and is now providing the fourth leg, he said.

“The InfiniSafe Cyber Storage guarantee is about the immutability of the snapshots,” he said. “So whatever is snapped on day one will be the same during the length of time set by the user, so if the data needs to be recovered, nothing will have changed. If there are 47 elements in the snapshot, they all will be there when needed.”

Herzog also said that a snapshot, regardless of the dataset size, is recoverable in under one minute.

This is the first time that anyone has provided a cyber storage guarantee for primary storage that Herzog said he is aware of. Others provide such guarantees for backup data, he said.

Infinidat offers financial compensation for both the performance guarantee and the InfiniSafe Cyber Storage guarantee, Herzog said.

“We’ve had millions of data snapshots taken,” he said. “Our focus is on the high end, the top 25 percent of the Fortune 1000 businesses. We’ve done our technical analysis. We feel this is a low-risk effort on our part. We know our own record.”

Bob Elliott, vice president of storage sales at Mainline Information Systems, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based solution provider and Infinidat channel partner, told CRN he has the utmost confidence and respect for Infinidat’s products and its executive team.

“Ransomware recovery is the hot topic,” Elliott said. “Everybody wants to save their bacon. I love how Infinidat guarantees the recovery time. This gives customers peace of mind when coupled with the performance and price of Infinidat and becomes a preferrable solution.“

Infinidat has proven to be a good vendor partner, said Kirk Sannella, area vice president West at Technologent, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider and Infinidat channel partner.

“It’s a partnership that works,” Sannella told CRN. “And I like to see them put their money where their mouth is for performance and cyber storage.”