Infinidat Inc. recently introduced enhancements to its data protection solution, InfiniGuard. The new version of this backup and recovery platform includes InfiniSafe, a new technology that provides data protection enhancements, disaster recovery and business continuity.

The data storage company promises a 100% availability and world-class application performance, according to Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer of Infinidat. To fulfill these promises, the InifiniGuard engineering team designed the software to provide immutable snapshots, a virtual air gap, and an instantaneous recovery. With the help of Veeam software, this robust storage-based solution determines safe recovery points and delivers near-instantaneous recovery, Herzog added.

“We can take a 1.5-petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022,” Herzog stated. “On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we’re talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available.”

Herzog spoke with theCUBE industry analysts  Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at VeeamON , during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed InifiniGuard, InfiniBox, immutable data and data recovery. (* Disclosure below.)

​​Vellante: What are you doing at VeeamON. You guys started this journey into data protection several years ago.

Herzog: We do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration, we’ve got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything. And we have a purpose-built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard , which works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the deduplication, compression, etc. The standard product [InfiniBox] does not; it’s just a standard high-performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple of customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that’s customized for it? 

Vellante: Do you see this movement into data protection as a kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Can you kind of explain the strategy there? 

Herzog: So it’s actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. We have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. I n fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox— all-flash array. But they started with backup first and then moved to [storage array], so we’ve got them moving both directions. 

So then we had an all-flash array and purpose-built backup. So we can do high-performance enterprise storage. And then, of course, modern data protection with our partnerships, such as what we do with Veeam, and we’ve [also] incorporated across the entire portfolio intense cyber-resilience technology. 

Vellante: Why does the world need another purpose-built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? 

Herzog: The first thing we brought was much higher performance. The second area has been capex and opex reduction. For example, we have a cloud service provider [selling backup as a service] who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose-built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backups. They happen to be using Veeam, as well as one other backup company. 

Nicholson: So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? 

Herzog: So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that’s only part of it. The second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote, and we can provide and combine local with remote. So, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device — the purpose-built backup appliance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, and a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. 

Nicholson: People talk about immutable copies — immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? 

Herzog: So what’s new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around. The real use of immutable snapshots was to replace [write only read many], which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance [for] healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies [that] were worried about the SEC or the EU or the Japanese Finance Ministry coming down on them because they’re out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snapshot. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that’s not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability is now creating the air gap part. 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VeeamON event :

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VeeamON event. Neither Infinidat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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