SanDisk InfiniFlash flash arrays get Nexenta software-defined storage

Storage hardware maker SanDisk has teamed up with storage software supplier Nexenta to provide pre-configured all-flash storage arrays.

In the partnership, SanDisk's IF100 InfiniFlash flash array is married with Nexenta's NexentaStor software-defined storage.

InfiniFlash IF100 is the hardware-only version of a range of flash arrays launched earlier in 2015 by SanDisk. It scales from 64TB to 2PB and is equipped with SanDisk's proprietary PCIe SAS-connected 8TB Nand flash cards, also called InfiniFlash.

InfiniFlash offers high density of flash storage by packing in raw flash capacity without controller software, which is provided in the IF100 by an original equipment manufacturer partner – in this case Nexenta – supplying the software intelligence to govern flash operations.

SanDisk claims input/output operations per second (IOPS) figures north of one million with sequential throughput of around 7GBps.

There is also the IF500, aimed at Ceph object storage implementations, and the IF700, aimed at high-performance database workloads. These, however, are not part of the partnership with Nexenta and come with their own Linux-based operating systems.

Nexenta's NexentaStor storage software is built on the ZFS and provides block (8Gbps and 16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE iSCSI) plus file (Server Message Block and Network File System) access. NexentaStor supports striped and mirrored Raid 10 or parity-based Raid levels five and six.

Asynchronous replication is supported in NexentaStor along with unlimited snapshots and thin provisioning.

The move is the latest in the steadily rising trend in which customers are given more choice about which storage software they use on generic hardware, whether dedicated storage hardware, as in this case, or storage systems built from commodity server hardware, as in, for example, DataCore's recent partnership with reseller Curvature.

The ability to choose storage software and the hardware it is implemented upon reduces costs for customers in a market that has been dominated by the big six storage array makers and their costly products.