InfiniSync backup ‘bunker’ gives zero RPO for critical apps

Large-capacity hybrid flash array maker Infinidat has launched a new category of backup hardware, the InfiniSync – an aircraft-style black box that acts like an off-site backup location but is on-site.

The launch comes alongside three other products: a new petabyte-scale hybrid flash array, the F6212; a high-capacity backup and deduplication box, the InfiniGuard; and a storage-only public cloud service, Neutrix Cloud.

InfiniSync results from IP gained in partnership with Axxana.

The hardware comprises a damage-resistant black box to which data is replicated within the datacentre. The company says it can eliminate an entire datacentre in triple-protected mission-critical environments, but still maintain zero RPO (recovery point objective) from primary systems.

Where usually a primary site mirrors synchronously to a secondary site and then asynchronously to a third, replication to InfiniSync hardware on-site is synchronous. From there to off-site locations it is asynchronous and carried out simultaneously.

Infinidat calls it “a 450-pound, ballistically hardened data bunker appliance”.

The InfiniSync box senses heat or power outages and, upon registering such an impending disaster, it begins to ship out data by network, Wi-Fi or 3G cellular comms, depending on what is available.

“This covers most failures,” said Infinidat CTO Eran Brown. “Infinisync acts as a black box – as a bunker – a protected second site in the datacentre. It can withstand heat to 950 degrees and be dropped several storeys.”

Infinidat’s core product is Infinibox, an array products that provides an unorthodox storage architecture based on a small amount of dynamic random access memory and flash as cache, backed up with large amounts of nearline-SAS spinning disk.

Performance is boosted by the use of three array controllers instead of the usual two. This extra central processing unit capacity helps ensure data is directed to cache as necessary, while I/O achieves 750,000 input/output operations per second and availability is 99.99999% (seven nines).

The new F6212 array achieves around 4PB of capacity in a 4U rack.

Meanwhile, Infinidat’s Neutrix Cloud is a dedicated cloud storage service.

The idea, said Brown, is that customers use Neutrix Cloud as cheap cloud storage for applications that use processing in the main cloud providers’ services. It claims its cloud storage is cheaper than that of the three main providers, Amazon, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Neutrix Cloud can also be run in conjunction with on-premise InfiniBox storage in hybrid cloud mode with a four-second RPO.

Finally, Infinidat has partnered with backup specialist Quantum to provide a backup appliance based on Infinidat hardware that can scale to multiple petabytes.