Infinidat array gets no-footprint iSCSI

Big iron array vendor Infinidat has made its third major software release, adding compression, baked-in iSCSI support and enhanced array analytics.
The company’s architecture has three controller nodes, which each can see all the drives, and eschews an all-flash design, relying instead on up 1,2Tb to 3,2Tb of DRAM caching, 24Tb to 210Tb of NAND cache, and up to 480 7 200rpm disk drives.
The system offers seven “nines” of uptime year – 99,99999% availability.
There are now four InfiniBox arrays in the range:
* F1000 with up to 115TB of usable capacity, 3GB/sec bandwidth and 300,000 IOPS.
* F2000 with 248TB – 499TB of usable capacity, 7GB/sec bandwidth and 500,000 IOPS.
* F4000 with 682TB – 1,024TB of usable capacity, 10GB/sec bandwidth and 750,000 IOPS.
* F6000 with 1,035TB – 2,765TB of usable capacity, 12.5GB/sec bandwidth and 1,000,000 IOPS
V3.0 of the InfiniBox software compresses data inline without impacting access performance. A data write arrives and is acknowledged in 180 microsecondss. Then a background allocator function pulls the new data sectors and marshalls them for persistent storage on disk and the compression is done here so that data is compressed before it is written to disk.
Currently, the LV4 algorithm is used but there will be a library of algorithms for different types of data so that compression improves over time.
Compression can be switched on or off, on a per-volume or file system basis, and the capability is part of a free OS upgrade to all supported InfiniBox customers that Infinidat will guarantee a 2X compression ratio result. With compression, Infinidat says its arrays scale to over 5Pb of usable storage capacity in a standard 42U rack.
Previously iSCSI support, which arrived in 2015, was a third-party-produced piece of software and necessitated the use of 3U iSCSI nodes in a rack, space which has now been reclaimed. V3 of the IOS has INFINIDAT’s own software iSCSI technology, running natively on its cluster of three controllers. This makes iSCSI a first level peer protocol to FICON, Fibre Channel and NFS.