Exclusive Interview With Infinidat Founder and Chief Technical Evangelist Moshe Yanai, Moving from CEO

Moshe Yanai, 70, has decided recently to step down to chief technical evangelist of Infinidat Ltd., after 9 years as CEO, a company He founded in 2011. Previously he started XIV in 2001 and sold it to IBM in 2008. He’s also the father of the Symmetrix at EMC he joined in 1987 from Nixdorf in US. He started his career at Elbit System in Israel.

StorageNewsletter.com: Infinidat was founded in 2011 and raised $325 million before the last round, could you share some details about this recent round, why you need it?
Yanai: Recently, we announced a new funding round focused on developing new initiatives, such as an increasing demand for flexible consumption models. This will strengthen Infinidat’s growth plans, enabling it to build further on its industry leadership position. It will also be used for technical research and product development.

As you are aware, we are a private company, so we don’t disclose such information.

With that in mind could you refresh us with a company snapshot?
The number of customers implementing Infinidat’s solutions is increasing worldwide, to the extent that we have deployed over 6EB  in less than 6 years, with over an exabyte of sales in just the past six months alone. The scale of Infinidat’s accelerating global customer footprint and the diverse range of use cases that customers are delivering with our technology, proves that are onto something big here. We have a wide range of customers worldwide, ranging from the financial, public sector to healthcare vertical markets. Being a global company, we have employees in our key strategic growth markets as well. This ranges from the Americas, EMEA to Japan.

A bit difficult to obtain numbers from you. You recently changed from CEO to chief technical evangelist and, as you said in your blog post announcing that move, you’re already 70. As some other industry leaders did, they sell the company they lead before retiring, it was the case for Pat Martin with StorageTek or Joe Tucci with EMC to list 2 famous examples and these 2 CEOs were not founders respectively of StorageTek or EMC of course. The difference with you is you stay and continue to work in the company but should we understand Infinidat will follow similar path potentially (a sales)? Or plan an IPO? under the new management.
Having 2 industry veterans, Nir Simon and Kariel Sandler, now in charge has enabled me to focus on what businesses need. And right now, with so many uncertainties in the market (public health, financial, operational), businesses are focusing on 2 aspects. Firstly, they need to optimize their cash flow, which for IT infrastructure means both cutting costs but more importantly spending only when you need to; postponing expenses until necessary is also critical. Secondly, we are finding time to market is vital, given businesses are operating in a competitive landscape that values time to market above all else. Businesses can’t delay spending until the infrastructure is already needed, as this will delay time to market.

Like many companies, Covid-19 has impacted Infinidat employees on how their work but what about your business? Did you see an inflection point?
Family and employees well being is paramount, as well as focusing on minimizing risks to businesses, due to the potential disruption of global IT supply chains. Infinidat began increasing inventory levels in December, 2019 and we were highly confident in our ability to deliver all 1H20 systems, within 14 days of ordering. While we did not experience any disruption in our manufacturing supply chain, we did see significant increases in three related areas:

• 20% increase in installation delays caused by limited availability of on-premises data center staff
• 65% increase in unplanned Capacity On Demand (COD) activations
• Numerous customer requests for temporary “swing” loaned capacity and individual customer needs. To clarify, COD is unpurchased storage capacity on existing Infinidat CapEx systems that customers can consume immediately, when needed. FLX is Infinidat’s Opex storage consumption model, billed monthly. Up to 100% of installed capacity can be used for 30 days at no additional charge. 

What is the $/TB on your price list? or what is the price for a 10PB configuration?
I think the focus on pricing is correct and moreover price is regaining its rightful place at the center of IT decision making. During the booming years of the economy, companies were sometimes willing to spend a lot of extra money to get that fuzzy feeling, when you pay a premium for something. Now, they are looking for cost savings and to postpone expenses. With this in mind, I think many of them will not be looking for IT infrastructure that offers the latest buzzword but rather what will drive the best value, from their limited budget and (now more limited than ever). In addition, they will look for reliability, to keep their applications available 100% of the time.

OK, so we understand you’re unable to give us any price range. Infinidat delivers a high-performance level at an efficient cost without being an AFA thanks to an architecture called Neural Cache, leveraging DRAM and flash to drive performance while storing most data in HDDs for cost. What are the key points here? How do you convince end-users to buy Infinidat when lots of RFPs require and mention all flash products?
I think that when the economy was growing, it was harder to get businesses to come out of their comfort zone and look at driving performance, using innovative architecture and software. We often let end-users test the systems using production workloads, with the ability to give them back, without any questions asked. When customers saw our confidence, they were often willing to test us in real-life scenarios. Now with budget constraints, we see businesses that may have been reluctant in the past, to test us, reaching out to us. This is because they are looking to stop the AFA spending that is draining their budgets. At the same time, customer testimonials of our reliability is a true validation for us. We’ve seen so many cases of storage specialists, who have used our products in one company and then once they’ve moved to another company, immediately convinced them to bring our systems in to increase reliability, reduce cost and perhaps most important nowadays – postpone expenditure. Postponing expenditure means paying only for what you’re actually using, effectively bringing the consumption model of the public clouds on-premises, while also allowing businesses to opt between Capex and Opex, as they see fit.

I understand that I/Os are protected by a synchronous copy via IB to the memory of a second controller. What about adding persistent memory in that schema with devices like Intel Optane, Samsung Z-Nand or Kioxia XL-Flash for instance?
As an engineer, I always ask my colleagues to show me the numbers behind the problems they present to me. DRAM has the fastest response times (nanoseconds), while persistent memory is already into the microseconds and flash is in the 100’s of microseconds. We already accept all the writes and provide most of the reads from DRAM, so we don’t need persistent memory to drive performance (unlike AFAs). We do like it though, for other technical capabilities.

Some vendors promote 1 tier only with full flash with high deduplication ratio and beat hybrid storage array? It seems to be a philosophy difference as both approaches, Infinidat’s one and this one have their own justification? How do you answer to this model? With price per usable terabyte?
While we are cheaper per effective terabyte, I think businesses are now looking for vendors to move up the value chain and help their applications increase revenues. Our Elastic Pricing consumption model, enables businesses to gain the agility of the cloud, without having to pay the “cloud-tax” and without the cybersecurity challenges of operating in the cloud that is viewed as a business advantage. They don’t care how we achieve high performance, as long as we do. Just like today, from a performance perspective, we don’t care if our car is electric or gas powered, we care that it achieves speed in a cost efficient manner.

You recently announced NVMe-oF and you pick TCP, we understand the standard choice with the absence of specific hardware to deploy. Also it means an immediate gain for I/Os as it shrinks latency by a huge factor. Could you share the logic behind these choices?
When people talk about NVMe-oF they talk about it removing the protocol latency but they often leave out 2 important things. First of all, it needs to be ubiquitous to make it widely adopted that will only happen if it’s a software-defined approach, without specialized hardware. Secondly, once you remove the protocol latency you end up with the media latency and as most IO/s come from DRAM, you get the fastest solution possible. That’s how you enable enterprises to adopt NVMe-oF: you give them something easy to deploy, with a tangible performance improvement, while reducing costs – it’s hard to say no to this.

InfiniBox is rich in term of Data Services and you announced recently some new replication capabilities for BC and DR. What is new and what can users do with these new iterations?
We’ve always focused our data protection on minimizing RTO and RPO, without inflating costs and without requiring licensing. Added to this, is our latest 100% availability guarantee for customers, which has the highest remedies in the industry and you get a solution ideally suited for our current economic climate.

InfiniBox is historically a block storage array as you had a dedicated file server in the past but you dropped it and then you added file sharing protocols to offer an unified solution. I think you sell high-end block array as the main argument, and then the file aspect comes in second but not the reverse, right? Also, what is the proportion of file and block usages in the field?
Infinidat’s philosophy is always to simplify customers’ lives. So, our goal is to have NAS integrated into the same product, just like we offer active-active in the same product and with no licensing. Once we had NAS inside the main product, customers got no added value from the NAS-only product. Last year, we crossed the 30% attach rate for NAS globally, so we are a NAS focused company.

In fact, we see a lot of interest in the chip design industry – a NAS-centric industry that doesn’t benefit from data reduction and has immense data volumes. Customers can achieve 5x cost savings, while also improving operational aspects such as backup and recovery times.

Infinidat is 100% indirect and you offer different purchase methods, any details on these? There is a new model named Elastic Pricing, does it replace an existing one?
We are committed to our channel partners and take care to make sure they see our storage as a profitable component in their portfolio. Elastic Pricing is the next evolution of our flexible consumption models, allowing customers to pay as they grow, and opt between Capex or Opex (or even both simultaneously) to do so. Customers usually do not like paying with Opex but are forced to if they want to gain instant elasticity. We allow them to gain that flexibility, reduce costs and use the consumption models that best fits their needs at that time.

What about Neutrix Cloud? How is it received by the market? What is the proportion of sales between all models?
For businesses, moving to the cloud, data sovereignty is increasingly a challenge. Neutrix allows our customers to maintain sovereignty in the public cloud, while also enabling them to run a true multi-cloud strategy. Large enterprises such as our customers don’t go to the cloud to save costs – it actually costs them more – they go to gain new technical capabilities but are still required/regulated to maintain compliance over their customers’ data.

What about OEM and alliances? Is it a strategy for you? I understand you have distributors and system integrators but what about other IT vendors? I think you had an agreement with IBM in the past.
We form strategic partnerships, where we see mutual benefits. Any partnership that is not a win-win won’t endure. Our goal is to make our partners successful, by offering a unique high performance storage portfolio value proposition – this is disruptive in comparison to non-Infinidat partners, who can only offer expensive all-flash solutions.

If you are a partner that already has 2 AFA solutions under your belt, you compete with other AFAs on price most of the time and your margins erode over time. If you are an Infinidat partner, you bring such a different approach to the customer and a significant price disruption that your margins can go back to where they were. This enables you to move the discussion with the customer from “speeds and feeds” to the value of the business units.

Who are the brands you replaced the most, give us your top 3 vendors? What are the main reasons users replaced them by Infinidat? Consolidation and TCO are the main drivers I presume.
We replace all the traditional vendors who insist on bolting-on new technologies on 30 years old architecture (some of which I designed myself at the time), as they lose their relevance. As for consolidation, we usually see anywhere between 3-7 arrays consolidated into a single InfiniBox on average, and consolidation drives automation, as it’s easier to automate across a single vendor running your SAN, NAS and Active-Active than it was when the customer ran 3 vendors to achieve the same goal!

And to conclude, what could we expect for the rest of 2020?
We are focused on helping our customers come out on the winning side of the current financial uncertainty, with more flexibility in postponing infrastructure investments, lower costs and increased agility to better serve their business units. At the same time, we are investing in the next set of disruptive capabilities that will help them grow their business, as the markets start to recover and we hope that happens sooner rather than later.