A major selling point of innovative cloud infrastructure is limitless scalability. Ironically, once an organization hits mega scale, economics could send them hurtling back from advanced all-flash storage to more old-school methods.

“The all-flash array movement is great for certain workloads,” said Erik Kaulberg (pictured, right), senior director of cloud solutions at Infinidat Inc. However, companies should think carefully about whether their workloads belong to that category before they invest, he added. “For 80 to 90 percent of common data center environments, it’s just a way to make storage expensive again,” Kaulberg stated.

Kaulberg joined Jason Chamiak (pictured, left), senior systems engineer at Peak 10, Inc. (Peak 10 + ViaWest), for a live interview during the recent VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Peak 10 + ViaWest is a recently merged hybrid information technology company specializing in co-location and cloud services. When the company recently went shopping for all-flash arrays to power its solutions, it happened on Infinidat and ended up opting for the company’s InfiniBox storage arrays instead.

“Infinidat just happened to outperform pretty much everything that we benchmarked,” Chamiak told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

“What we do with our combination of flash and DRAM [dynamic random-access memory] and high-capacity hard drives allows us to make sure that the workloads are in the right place at the right time all the time,” Kaulberg said. The intelligent use of flash with cheaper storage methods reduces cost without hurting performance, he added.

TCO TKOs vSAN?

Applications running on InfiniBox arrays performed 500 to 800 percent better versus other storage arrays Peak 10 + ViaWest tested, Chamiak said. This has translated to shortened go-to-market times for its clients. The company also spends less time on configuration thanks to Infindat’s pre-optimization.

“It’s basically set it and forget it,” Chamiak said.

Efficiencies like these, in addition to value gained from shifting time and resources to tasks like analytics add to massive savings, according to Kaulberg. For instance, “Head to head against [VMware Inc.’s flash or hybrid storage storage solution] vSAN at scale, there is no comparison,” he said. For data centers with multiple petabytes of data, the difference in total cost of ownership could be as wide as $12 million for vSAN versus $2 million for Infinidat, Kaulberg claimed.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Infinidat Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE