VIDEO | Infinidat Chief Marketing Officer: Data Storage Impacts Capital and Operational Expenditure

(US and Canada) Infinidat’s Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer, and Ken Steinhardt, Field Chief Technology Officer, speak with Robert Lutton, VP, Sandhill Consultants, about what Infinidat does as a company, the impact of storage infrastructure on organizational data center and business costs, how they help improve organizations’ business value from an ROI perspective, and how storage enhances work productivity.

Herzog introduces Infinidat as a global enterprise storage-centric company. Infinidat’s focus is upper-end solutions, applications, workloads, and use cases, with 25% of Fortune 50 companies using their solutions, he adds.

According to Herzog, Infinidat aims to reduce capital and operational expenditures for their clients. In their hundred years of storage experience, he and Steinhardt have not come across a CIO who had a background in storage. However, he continues, storage helps optimize business results by reducing capital expenditure, which otherwise is an expensive proposition.

Herzog states that storage impacts data centers in multiple ways: it impacts the capital expenditure, the operational expenditure, and real-world applications such as workloads. He cites an example where an SAP workload takes 2.5 hours to run on others’ storage, whereas the same runs in 30 minutes by just switching the storage. This shows how storage impacts operational expenses of functions outside of IT, such as logistics, manufacturing, finance, shipping, support, and service, he adds.

Infinidat also consolidates storage, Herzog indicates. Citing another example, he mentions one customer, who had 57 storage arrays for workloads from another vendor; now, they are now running on five Infinidat products. This freed up the floor space, power, cooling, and tons of operational manpower while accelerating workloads by running them four times faster than previous storage, according to Herzog.

These examples demonstrate how storage can massively impact costs, says Herzog. He further stresses the importance of helping customers protect their data with backup solutions, recalling a customer who previously had 14 backup devices, but now runs on two. 

Additionally, he mentions Infinidat’s software which automatically identifies and proactively monitors the system’s health by using AI Ops, and automatically adapts to changes in workloads.

When sharing how Infinidat helps organizations improve, Herzog mentions a global Fortune 50 company that had run on 250 petabytes of storage until Infinidat cut it down to 50. Due to this change, Herzog claims Infinidat has helped the company save 100 million USD in capital expenditure and 5 million USD a year in operational expenditure.

The applications are now running five times faster; the workload that took five hours to run now takes one hour, says Herzog, adding that speed comes from the capability of consolidating storage and autonomous automation, where the software automates almost everything in the storage infrastructure.

From the worker productivity perspective, Herzog claims that one storage manager can manage 50 petabytes that usually takes four administrators. Considering functions outside of IT, like manufacturing, heightened productivity is evidenced when the SAP report that took five hours now runs in an hour. The type of storage enhances employee productivity inside and outside of IT, affirms Herzog.