Upstart big iron storage supplier maintains monolithic momentum

Infinidat has piled up more customer wins as its InfiniBox arrays take more high-end storage array sales from the incumbents.

In Infinidat's second 2016 quarter sales grew more than 60 per cent compared to the first 2016 quarter, and 100 per cent compared to the second quarter of 2015.

It said one Fortune 500 financial services customer has multiple InfiniBoxes at different sites with 25PB of total Infinidat storage capacity.

Sales in the quarter were spread across the finance sector (32 per cent), technology, telecommunications and cloud services (28 per cent), and healthcare and life sciences (24 per cent), which leaves 16 per cent elsewhere.

Here are Infinidat's summarised growth rates over the past few quarters:

• April 2015 – decloaks from stealth
• July 2015 – 300 per cent sales growth in Q2 over Q1 2015
• Nov 2015 – 61 per cent quarter-over-quarter growth in Q3 2015
• Feb 2016 – 183 per cent quarter-on-quarter growth in Q4 2015. >250PB of shipped capacity. 331 per cent year-on-year growth
• May 2016 – 213 per cent year-on-year growth from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016. 422PB of shipped storage. Q4 2015 to Q1 2016 growth rate not revealed.
• Aug 2016 – 60 per cent quarter-on-quarter sales growth Q1 to Q2 2016. 100 per cent year-on-year growth Q2 2015 to Q2 2016. Doubled customer wins in Q2 compared to Q1.

Of all the monolithic array suppliers (EMC, HDS and IBM) only Infinidat is reporting such growth. We would estimate that all-flash DS8000, VMAX and VSP systems are enjoying high growth compared to their disk equivalents but, overall, Infinidat is taking share from EMC, HDS and IBM.

Eventually we think these three will come out with revised systems that have Infinidat-class seven nines reliability and comparable pricing. Until then, Infinidat CEO Moshe Yanai's forward progress could continue for a good few quarters yet. ®