Corrections on Article “Start-Up Profile: Infinidat”

Following the publication of our article Start-Up Profile: Infinidat, Infinidat’s CEO Moshe Yanai ask us by email to publish these comments, here respecting his original writing:

I respect independent thinkers and their freedom to write whatever they want to, my problem is of presenting non based rumors (lies, urban legends,etc) as real and then other authors copy it. But, I don’t want to spoil a good story with the facts… so can you please at least add some disclaimer about it or add the source to your writings?. For example, in yellow:

“He joined EMC in 1987, hired by Dick Egan to design and manage the Symmetrix (now Dell EMC VMAX) development software and hardware before leaving (or being fired?) EMC in 2001 to form XIV. Romors are that He couldn’t get a good salary when he arrives at EMC and offers to get a percentage on each Symmetrix sold. Romors are that He then was angry to see EMC acquiring Data General at the origin of CLARiiON (then VNX) for as much as $1.1 billion in 1999 because he thought the company was able to design open mid-range arrays. Introduced in 1990, Symmetrix, with large cache memory for fast access to data and HA in a small footprint using lower-cost 5.25-inch HDDs for mainframes, was probably the most successful storage products in the history of the storage industry, beating IBM. In five years, EMC accounted for 41% of mainframe storage terabytes shipped while Big Blue’s share fell to 35%.

Romors are that Getting a lot of money from EMC, and then selling shares in XIV and Diligent, “Mr. Symmetrix” is one of the healthiest man in the storage industry. And his fortune will continue to grow with Infinidat, current start-up competing directly with VMAX, finally the best revenge for Yanai.
 
B. I also have many comments about the product but they aren’t important as the following:

1. Replication – your statement that “What’s is missing today is replication” is wrong. We have by far the best replication in the industry in terms of performance, RPO and cost.

2. Market – “The start-up has designed a modern architecture for high-end storage subsystems” – it’s true that some of our big customers are using us as high end storage subsystems but we have many customers who are using us for data analytic of extremely large and exponentially growing big data projects. We are the only one who can support the reliability, performance and cost requirements for such systems and that the design propose of our system.
 
3. Axxana – “will use replication technology of Infinidat’s wholly-owned subsidiary Axxana” – Axxana is just an add-on reliability on top of our replication technology for users who replicate for long distance (can’t do sync) and don’t want to lose any bit of data.

4 Many more comments but they aren’t important to change in the article but just for your information such as number of customers (more the double then in your writings): Competitors “Monolithic high-end storage systems from Dell EMC, HDS, IBM” – its more like Pure Storage, Nutanix, ScaleIO etc etc