Mauritz Du Toit, Director of iSanity, tells Intelligent Data Centres why Infinidat’s storage solution has proved beneficial to its operations.
Our data footprint is skyrocketing. Big Data, cloud, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, analytics and many more are all driving unprecedented data growth. These days, capturing, storing and analysing data at this sort of scale is proving challenging for organisations across the board.
Legacy systems are too cumbersome and unreliable, lacking the technology needed to maintain the appropriate performance and use up too much space and power. This results in modern storage infrastructures becoming a mishmash of point solutions, compromises and less than ideal technologies.
However, Infinidat overcomes these issues by offering both exceptional performance and extremely high reliability at a price that won’t break the bank. Its solutions boast the greatest storage density and are designed to store the gargantuan amounts of data in a single floor tile. The result?
Organisations can do more with less and remain competitive and ahead of the curve.
With this in mind, leading information management solutions provider, iSanity, introduced the Infinidat brand to the South African market six years ago, to bring to its customers an Enterprise Storage Solution that would revolutionise the way traditional storage environments function and disrupt traditional storage architectures and performance.
“We were successful when we introduced Real People (DMC) to Infinidat in East London,” said Mauritz Du Toit, iSanity’s spokesperson. “The company needed a storage solution that would accommodate projected company growth and one that offered top reliability and performance.”
Du Toit, however, added that a challenge presented itself when DMC was not immediately able to make full use of a 1PB Infinidat Box. “Fortunately, Infinidat debuted its ‘Capacity On Demand’ model, which meant that DMC only purchased the amount of storage it required at that time and it still gets the full 1PB Box, meaning DMC had the ability to grow into the box as and when needed with the ‘Capacity On Demand Model’.
Du Toit said DMC was iSanity’s first official Infinidat client in South Africa in 2015 and the second Infinidat Box introduced into the market. “In 2019, after four years, our customer sent out a request for a quote for new storage as its current technology was nearing its end of life and maintenance agreement.”
iSanity was up against all the major players in the storage arena, yet still managed to beat out the competition and close the deal. “We did this not only on price point, but by replacing additional hardware and lowering DMC’s server room footprint and installing the second Infinidat Box for DMC.”
“Every five years we need to replace our storage and therefore create an RFP,” said Morné Owen, Chief Information Officer at DMC. “As with all companies today, our budgets aren’t limitless and Infinidat was the only solution that could deliver what we needed within our budget. In fact, other quotes were more than double the price. We are extremely happy with the performance and find the solution is really good value for money.”
According to Owen, the biggest issue with storage, as with hardware in general, is that over time it fails. “This is an unavoidable cycle. Hardware will always need to be replaced eventually. However, iSanity has enabled us to grow by providing the additional capacity we needed with a cost-effective solution. We get optimum performance out of the Infinidat Box, which allows our business to do more. The product is of excellent quality and the technology is world class. In fact, the bulk of the device uses spindle disks, not solid state, but the firmware and the algorithms it employs enables it to perform better than some solid-state technology.”
To date, Du Toit says iSanity has installed more than 10 Infinidat Boxes in South Africa and also employs Infinidat technology for its own IaaS that it provides for clients. “Today’s world is unrecognisable from yesterday’s,” Du Toit said. “The pace of change we are seeing is unprecedented and at the heart of this change is data. Businesses of every type and size need it in order to thrive and survive. The common maxim today is that the organisations that will remain ahead of the curve are those who can glean the maximum value from their data, which means having the ability to gather and analyse it as quickly as possible.”
In this way, no data can simply be thrown away, he said. “Today’s organisations have to be able to store data at scale. Yesterday’s systems have a tendency to break down as they scale, requiring human intervention and unplanned and un-budgeted for expenses. At the same time, niche solutions are rearing their heads around every corner, creating additional silos of cost and greatly adding to the complexity and management inside our data centres. Only a very unique storage platform has the ability to handle data at scale.
“Over the years, Infinidat, with its team of expert storage developers who are armed with all the requisite skill and knowledge, has established a reputation as a company that builds game-changing storage technologies that have forever altered the course of the storage industry and brought tremendous value to its customers.
“With Infinidat, anything is possible with the power of data. When the IT department harnesses the power of Infinidat’s storage solutions, they can gain insights from vast amounts of information that they previously didn’t have the capacity to,” Du Toit said.
“When you become a client of iSanity and Infinidat, you eliminate data constraints such as information storage capacity and cost and have the ability to take advantage of a best-in-class solution that can help your business join the digital age, focus on innovation and explore new business models,” Du Toit concluded.
