Moshe Yanai Chief Technology Evangelist, Infinidat
Stepping down as CEO
By Philippe Nicolas | May 14, 2020 at 2:35 pm
This post, written by Moshe Yanai, CEO of Infinidat Ltd., appeared on May 8 on the company’s blog.
Dear friends,
As I celebrate my 70th birthday, I can’t help but be amazed looking back at the extraordinary progress of technology, and its profound influence on humanity. My life’s work is, and continues to be, focused on a small but delightfully complex piece of that puzzle–inventing new technologies for storing the vast amount of information created by humankind, and then working with customers to imagine the next generation of use cases, applications, and platforms made possible by these new technologies.
Infinidat is the culmination of this journey. We started in 2011 with a vision that customers in coming decades would require enterprise storage that was bigger, faster, more reliable, and less expensive than anything currently in the market, and that a fundamentally new type of storage system was required in order to meet these future needs.
I’m an optimist to a fault, but the explosive growth of Infinidat since then has exceeded even my wildest imagination. We have deployed over 6EB of storage in less than six years on the market, with over 1EB of sales in the past 6 months alone. The scale of Infinidat’s accelerating global customer footprint, and the astonishing range of use cases that customers are delivering with our technology, proves that we are onto something big here.
In order to best navigate the next era of hypergrowth, we are making some changes at the leadership level of Infinidat. I am stepping aside as the CEO and into the role of chief technology evangelist. This will allow me to spend 100% of my time doing what I do best and love the most – developing the strategic vision for Infinidat and focusing on the present and future needs of our customers. I am working in close collaboration with our stalwart investors, including TPG and Goldman Sachs, to drive towards our next phases of growth. I am delighted to announce that two of my most trusted and longest serving deputies, COO Kariel Sandler and CFO Nir Simon, have stepped up to lead Infinidat.
Kariel and I have been working together for 16 years across three companies. For the past 9 years, he has led Infinidat’s R&D and Operations divisions, comprising the majority of Infinidat’s global workforce. Nir and I have been working together for 13 years across three companies. For the past 5 years, Nir has served as Infinidat’s CFO. Nir and Kariel are talented leaders who embody Infinidat’s culture of innovation, quality, and customer focus, and I am supremely confident in their ability to lead Infinidat’s business.
This is an exciting time for Infinidat. We have great people and great technology, but the reason we are successful is the partnership and trust that you, our customers, place in us. In my new role, I will be spending a lot more time working directly with you to define our shared roadmap and vision for the future, and this makes me very happy.
Please join me in congratulating Kariel and Nir, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
Moshe
Comments
It's a big news for Infinidat and an interesting one for the storage market meaning that Kariel Sandler, COO and Nir Simon, CFO, become co-CEOs.
We spoke with Moshe Yanai one month and we didn't notice any indication of such organization change. It seems that only a very few people were in the loop.
This move invited us to put in perspective his career and professional trajectory with the different brands and products he designed with his team. For more than 3 decades, Yanai has had an impact on the storage industry with essentially three brands and products: EMC with the famous Symmetrix family, XIV and since 2011 at Infinidat. All of them developed and offered block storage array and Infinidat has added some file capabilities to address unified consolidation projects.
Born in 1949 in Israel, Yanai earned a B.Sc in electrical engineering in 1975 from Technion, the famous Israel Institute of Technology located in Haifa.
We can split his career in four phases: Elbit, EMC, XIV and Infinidat.
The first phase started at Elbit Systems, a joint project with Nixdorf Computer, to build an IBM-compatible mainframe storage based on minicomputer disks. He then moved to US for Nixdorf to develop high-end storage systems.
The second phase that gave honors to him is of course associated with his time at EMC, for several people known by the EMC2 acronym for EMC Corporation. This company was founded in 1979 by Richard Egan, Roger Marino, and an unknown guy, some people say the C is for John Curley - to offer memory boards for Prime Computer and later other computers types like DEC VAX and Wang Laboratories minicomputers.
Rapidly, the company was led only by Egan and Marino and a few years later, around mid 80's, the team identified the need to develop a mainframe storage system with a first product in 1988 that appeared to be a disaster. In the meantime, EMC went public in April 1986 raising $30 million and the revenue that year was $66.6 million doubling from previous year.
This decision to address high-end storage demands really transformed EMC to a rocket star in the storage industry but also beyond storage. Recruited by Egan, Yanai arrived in 1987 to develop the Symmetrix line and Mike Ruettgers joined in 1988 as COO to become CEO in 1992 until 2001. This era was a stellar period.
In September 1990, EMC unveiled its first Symmetrix Integrated Cached Disk Array with some ideas Yanai continues to keep active today i.e at that time a cluster of PCs (today it's more than a PC), 5.25 HDDs and a big (at that time) DRAM for caching with RAID-1 data protection scheme. The main idea of Yanai was to write data to a remote memory to then land data to HDDs with intelligent caching algorithms. Under Yanai technology leadership, EMC release several generation of Symmetrix and the product was a best seller.
Joe Tucci joined EMC in 2000 as President and COO and became CEO in January 2001, Ruettgers moving executive chariman, and Yanai quit EMC the same year in 2001 as an EMC Fellow probably due to some strategic divergence around Data General acquisition and the development of storage for open systems. We heard that Yanai got a big check and Symmetrix royalties on every sale following his departure for many years.
The third era is XIV, an Israeli company he started in 2001 for a new generation of high-end disk storage array. And again the same idea appeared with a grid of x86 servers with their own resources i/e DRAM and disks, some of them acting as interface modules exposing host protocols (FC and iSCSI) and other as data modules for data persistency within the array connected to interface ones via a fast switched redundant network based on IB. With SSDs coming to the market, a new level of storage was added between the caching layer and the HDD pool.
XIV released generation 1 and IBM generation 2 and subsequent following the acquisition in January 2008 for approximately $300 million. Yanai led the XIV team and became an IBM fellow, he left in 2010 and became a very rich man.
The last and current epoch is Infinidat, Moshe founded in 2011 as CEO and this company represents the last iteration of his idea of a high-end disk array still with DRAM as cache, Flash/SSDs and HDDs to offer one of the lowest TCO on the market. This time 3 all-active Linux servers act as interface nodes connected to all 816 HDDs from 8 JBODs via a fast interconnect in the back-end. We expect NVMe over RoCE soon.
Infinidat has proven his success and adoption with already 6EB deployed as of Q4/2019: 3.7EB in Americas, 1.9EB in Europe and 388PB in APJ. As of today the firm has raised a total of $32 million in 3 rounds becoming a storage unicorn in April 2015. From now on, Yanai is chief technology evangelist.
Since the first product iteration, Yanai's ideas such symmetric clustering, global caching and multi-level storage finally span all these 3 eras - EMC, XIV and Infinidat - with of course significant improvements, new algorithms adding machine learning logic and the integration of new hardware components.
Moving to this position invites us to think about a semi-retirement period or the reverse more time dedicated to technology and future developments at Infinidat. But it exists of course another assumption with an exit always in mind when you reach the age to retire. We all remember Pat Martin who sold StorageTek to Sun Microsystems in 2005 or Joe Tucci who did the same with Dell in September 2016, they both got a big check to protect their retirement and several family generations ... But the difference is they were not founders. The future will tell us the reality but for sure Infinidat is attractive for several companies.
Yanai was also a stakeholder at Diligent, a pioneer in de-dupe, then sold to IBM in 2008 for $200 million. In parallel, he has some other board seats result of his investments, at Axxana, a data protection company, and in the medical company Sight Diagnostics. Infinidat acquired Axxana in 2017 and uses the technology as InfiniSync.
Known for several innovations and inventions, Yanai is associated with approximately 40 US patents in the field of electronic data storage.
In June 2011, Technion awarded him the honor Distinguished Fellow of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and in 2012, conferred upon him an Honorary Doctorate.
Photo taken with Moshe Yanai (3rd left), Brian Carmody, CTO (5th left) and Dan Shprung, EVP EMEA Sales (2nd right)
in November 2016 in Israel
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