Infinidat Debuts New Small-Footprint G4 Arrays, CMO Says Acquisition By Lenovo On Track

‘Lenovo has entry and midrange storage solutions. They don’t have anything high end. We don’t sell entry or midrange. So we fill that gap at the high end. Lenovo sells AI servers. Our Infinidat RAG AI data services matches that up well,’ says Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog.

Enterprise storage technology developer Infinidat Tuesday unveiled the expansion of its InfiniBox G4 line with a new smaller-form-factor model and enhancements to its existing lines.

Infinidat CMO Eric Herzog (pictured), in a conversation with CRN, also provided an update on Lenovo’s plan to acquire Infinidat.

Lenovo in January said it plans to acquire Infinidat for an undisclosed sum. Prior to the acquisition, Lenovo historically has relied on partnerships for the enterprise storage technology it needed to sell with its enterprise server business.

The acquisition is slated to close by year-end, which means the InfiniBox updates will likely be the last for Infinidat as a stand-alone company.

When the acquisition closes, the Infinidat business will be part of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, Herzog said. The Infinidat enterprise storage technology will complement Lenovo’s SMB and midrange storage capabilities, he said.

“Lenovo has entry and midrange storage solutions,” Herzog said. “They don’t have any high-end storage. We don’t sell entry or midrange. So we fill that gap at the high end. Lenovo sells AI servers. Our Infinidat RAG AI data services matches up well. There’s a way to push that together. We didn’t have servers, and they didn’t have high-end storage with AI RAG [retrieval-augmented generation].”

Lenovo also provides offerings around technologies including Oracle, SAP, VMware, Red Hat and the container world, Herzog said.

There are not a lot of overlapping products that need to be cut, Herzog said.

“Lenovo doesn’t have anything that’s anywhere close to the high-end storage we sell,” he said. “So Infinidat fits very well in their portfolio and solution side, especially the guys they partner with. We offer 100 percent availability, cyber recovery guarantees, performance guarantees, and none of that’s changing. But those are things you need in the high end. Lenovo hasn’t been able to have any of those checkboxes because they didn’t have the high-end solutions where you can do those kinds of guarantees. So it’s a very complementary play.”

Expanding The InfiniBox G4 Family

Infinidat is expanding its InfiniBox G4 family of arrays both on the system and the software side, Herzog said.

First, he said, the G4 is getting S3-compatible object storage native to its operating system, with no bolt-on or separate array needed.

The G4 is also getting smaller, Herzog said.

“We originally had the big boxes, then we went to 14U, but now we’re shrinking them another 30 percent to 11U, and introducing a lower capacity,” he said. “That means the partner can go after customers who don’t need as much capacity. And we’ve lowered the entry price point by 29 percent from the previous small form factor last year. It’s still a high-end enterprise offering, with 35 microseconds latency, all the cybersecurity stuff. We just shrank the physical form factor.”

The new entry-level G4 also now includes NVMe connectivity, giving it twice the bandwidth of the company’s prior entry-level offering, Herzog said.

The new entry capacity point improves affordability to expand its potential enterprise use cases, he said.

“It’s not going to be for ‘Herzog’s Cigar Store’ or the ‘Kovar Bar and Grill,’” he said. “It’s still going to be the Global Fortune 1000-type account. But there will be new use cases in factories, all of which have a mini data center. If the core goes down, they want to still be making cars or whatever they’re making. Some global enterprises have offices all over the world, and they use colocation centers in their smaller facilities. Or think of an office park with four or five buildings.”

Infinidat is also updating the size of hard drives available for its hybrid G4 arrays to provide customers with up to 33 petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack, up from the current maximum of 17.2 petabytes.

Looking ahead, Infinidat plans to add a low-cost QLC flash storage offering for customers looking to use the G4 as either a purpose-built data protection target or as a lower-cost primary storage array, Herzog said.

“We will have guidelines like, ‘Look, if you want this kind of performance, you need TLC,” he said. “If you want that kind of performance, you can go with QLC. We will be very prescriptive to the partners.”

It’s impressive how much Infinidat continues to invest in supporting its G4 family of storage arrays, said Neal Callahan, COO at Sycomp, a Foster City, Calif.-based solution provider and Infinidat channel partner

“If you’ve got the smaller footprint, better environmentals, faster bandwidth and enhanced software capabilities all tied to really a lower price point, my perception is customers are going to continue [to bring] the technology, the storage, into new areas, new applications and new workloads,” Callahan told CRN.

Callahan said he sees the smaller-footprint G4 arrays going into regional locations.

“Locations like remote data centers, remote setups, maybe some POC [proof of concept] centers, and things like that,” he said.

As far as Lenovo acquiring Infinidat, Callahan, whose company is also a Lenovo channel partner, was originally surprised to hear about the news but is now excited at the possibilities.

“I remember when Lenovo bought a portion of IBM,” he said. “It will be interesting to see Lenovo expand its product lines significantly and make them more viable in the marketplace. Even in the high-end SMB space, I think it’ll be a very big value-add.”