Storage Engineer
By now, most enterprises have discerned that cloud offerings are not for active data sets. And, while grinding through their budgets, due to egress charges and other ancillary charges, not actual IT resource utilization charge, they perhaps had to learn it the hard way. What if we were to share with you a new cloud offering, where your cloud storage was just as performant and as reliant as it is on-prem. And, your enterprise can experience greatly reduced egress charges from any Cloud Provider. Does this sound like a modern IT fantasy? It is not fantasy.
Part of Infinidat’s recent announcement of public cloud and data protection product lines is Neutrix Cloud. The other products, which we won’t be discussing here, are the new F6212 InfiniBox, along with InfiniSync and InfiniGuard who share the same Neural Cache software architecture.
Neutrix Cloud is a sovereign public storage cloud. It offers enterprise organizations extremely high performance, multi-petabyte cloud file systems and volumes. It allows you to exploit Block and File offerings at a neutral data center while leveraging Amazon AWS, Azure and Google for what they do best; compute. You might have heard Neutrix called by similar terms such as Cloud adjacent or Sovereign storage. This offering is cloud agnostic. It allows your enterprise to centralize all storage and to exploit cloud providers for compute functions at economies of scale, while avoiding cloud lock-in.
How does it work? The Neutrix Cloud constructs are like other offerings that utilize Regions and Availability Zones to provide redundancies and availability for your data sets. Your enterprise data is stored in Infinidat arrays at Infinidat data centers – the Neutrix Cloud. Infinidat then leverages its connections adjacent to fast-access entry points (i.e. low latency) to the Google public clouds, AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute. Keep in mind, these offering are only one hop away from cloud providers, so latency is low. This solution allows your enterprise to leverage the basic cloud tenants, which are cumbersome, with other offerings. This solution allows you to move your data among cloud providers seamlessly, which in turn allows you to take advantage of price fluctuations among cloud providers. Additionally, you could exploit Neutrix Cloud for Neutrix Cloud as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to simplify your Disaster Recovery. Your enterprise can continue to exploit its modern data protection tools, such as Actifio, Veeam, CommVault, Zerto and others, to allow further ROI from those tools.
Neutrix Cloud supports Block and File (NFS) access, and you can select either or both offerings. This brings all the benefits of having an Infinibox on-prem without your enterprise having to manage it… freeing your enterprise storage resources to focus on new business requirements or getting other areas of your enterprise future-ready.
So, you might be asking yourself, what are the competitive solutions to Neutrix Cloud? You could construe that they are Amazon AWS EBS and EFS offerings. However, due to the proximity of Infinidat arrays, via the Neutrix offering, the response times are much more conducive to active data sets than current AWS offerings. This allows your enterprise to take advantage of the cloud economies-of-scale, while not sacrificing performance. Another major benefit of Neutrix Cloud is leveraging it as a Storage as a Service (SaaS) with a 4 second Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The Neutrix Cloud offering brings traditional on-prem hardware availability and reliability to the cloud, which is a giant leap over current cloud data durability measurements.
Now that you understand how to leverage the technology, you need to know that there are cost savings, too. The Neutrix offering costs about two-thirds of Amazon costs, due to the flat rate $0.09/GB/month charges, along with no egress data charges. Quickly bringing your enterprise cloud flexibility while also enjoying cloud economies-of-scale, without cloud lock-in, which drives true business value.
From a technical perspective, you might be wondering how to set up the Neutrix Cloud for your enterprise to exploit. You can utilize the Infinidat CLI, and in a few steps, you are up and running. One example could look like the following… 1. Create a volume on your cloud provider; 2. Create a File System on that fresh cloud volume. Or, you could create the File System on several clouds to prevent cloud lock-in, while providing significantly higher file performance over native cloud file services offerings. So, if file services are faster via Neutrix, then you might be wondering how their Cloud Block performs, too. You will find that the Neutrix Block offerings are comparable, which can be translated as sometimes slower, sometimes faster. There are many variables that impact these Block offerings, and we cannot address all of them in this blog. Keep in mind that the Infinidat Neutrix Cloud is a pure operational expense (OpEx), which might have ramifications for your accounting to consider. They may need to make internal changes to allow your enterprise to exploit without delaying your rollout of Neutrix.
Still not convinced by this offer? Would you try out 25TiB free for 6-months? If yes, then let’s talk!
In summary, Infinidat Neutrix Cloud is a performant cloud offering for Block and File with tremendous cost benefits.
Yes, it is more than just cold storage, but if that is how you gain exposure to Infinidat, we will be happy to help your enterprise make the move to a modern data center.
For more information on Neutrix Cloud, check out https://www.infinidat.com/products-technology/neutrix-cloud.
Feel free to read the two below Infinidat blogs written by Robert Young, my coworker and Mainline Storage Engineer.
Infinidat’s SATA-Driven Disruption
Infinidat’s Preeminent Caching
Please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly, or click here to contact us with any questions.