Recently, Lenovo Group has announced its plan to acquire Infinidat Ltd., a supplier of data center storage systems backed by venture capital.
The financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed. Previously, Infinidat had raised over $350 million from investors such as TPG and Goldman Sachs, achieving profitability in 2022.
Infinidat offers two main storage array series: InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA. The former integrates disk drives with flash memory, while the latter features an all-flash design. Among them, the InfiniBox SSA series provides faster speed, promising sub-millisecond latency for data input and output operations.
Both series are powered by InfuzeOS, an independently developed storage operating system by Infinidat, which simplifies various data management tasks through multiple methods.
InfuzeOS includes a caching mechanism called Neural Cache, driven by AI models. It stores frequently accessed files in DRAM, which is 1000 times faster than flash memory, thereby accelerating data retrieval speeds. Additionally, this feature reduces the time required to write data to storage by omitting some typical steps.
To mitigate the impact of hardware failures, InfuzeOS creates multiple copies of each record and distributes them across several storage drives. If one drive fails, data remains intact as other copies are still available. Infinidat claims that InfuzeOS can prevent data loss even when multiple drives fail simultaneously.
Last year, Infinidat launched its new G4 series arrays, including upgrades to the all-flash InfiniBox SSA with capacities up to 16TB and new InfiniBox G4 hybrid storage systems with capacities up to 20TB.
Besides hardware products, Infinidat also offers a data protection service named InfiniGuard, enabling enterprises to create immutable backup copies that cannot be modified or deleted by ransomware. Administrators can also isolate these backups from the corporate network.
Lenovo Group is a leading supplier of entry-level and mid-range storage arrays. This acquisition will allow Lenovo to expand its presence in the high-end data center storage market. Furthermore, Lenovo anticipates that Infinidat's software development capabilities will enhance its internal engineering projects.
Other data center products from Lenovo's Infrastructure Solutions Group include servers optimized for AI workloads, equipped with Neptune cooling systems that dissipate heat generated by GPUs, CPUs, and additional memory using warm water.
Lenovo's storage, software, and services business saw a 35% increase in revenue last quarter compared to the same period last year, while sales of Neptune servers grew by 48%.
