5 great debates of enterprise storage: architecture, cyber resilience, immutable snapshots, uptime and service level agreements. High-end enterprise storage is one of the most foundational pieces of the enterprise data centre today, because of the enormous explosion of data - and where it needs to be stored and made available for applications and workloads. When you peel back the layers of enterprise storage, some very interesting debates emerge about what constitutes best-in-class enterprise storage. By the end of this article, you'll be able to decide where you and your current storage supplier stand on each of these five aspects of the "great debate" defining today's enterprise storage deployments. In an AI-centric world of data that is increasing exponentially, the stakes for enterprise storage are also exponentially high, which is why debating these issues is pertinent to enterprise storage purchase decisions today and in the foreseeable future. * The Architectural Matchup: Triple-redundant storage architecture vs. Dual-redundant storage architecture * Cyber Competition: Strong cyber storage resilience vs. Weak cyber storage resilience * Immutable to the Finish Line: True immutable snapshots of data with no backdoor vs. Semi-immutable snapshots of data with "backdoors" * The Uptime Challenge: 100% availability vs. 6 9's availability * Head-to-Head: Guaranteed SLAs vs. No guarantees DEBATE #1 | The Architectural Matchup: Triple-redundant storage architecture vs. Dual-redundant storage architecture Most enterprises are currently relying on a dual-redundant storage architecture - and some may not even know it. There are severe limitations to the dual-redundant architecture that create issues for enterprise customers. Performance can degrade faster. Direct and indirect costs tend to soar quickly with the dual approach. A triple-redundant storage architecture ensures a much higher degree of system reliability and availability, while providing superior performance because of the triple active, synchronized copies of data. This approach is designed to support continuous operations 24x7x365, allowing for instant failovers while eliminating single points of failure. Additionally, a triple-redundant architecture is ideal for high-throughput workloads vs. a dual-redundant architecture. DEBATE #2 | Cyber Competition: Strong cyber storage resilience vs. Weak cyber storage resilience Cybercriminals are attacking enterprise data centres and their storage infrastructures, as well as corrupting backups, at an alarming rate, and snapshots alone are no longer sufficient. No wonder the question is not "will our enterprise suffer a cyberattack?", but "when and how often?" With weak cyber resilience, an enterprise is not able to isolate and perform cyber detection on the compromised data, which means it will likely replicate corrupt data and spread it around the enterprise, unknowingly. It also means that an enterprise is likely to be slow in responding to a cyberattack on the storage infrastructure and not have the capability to recover quick from an attack. In contrast, strong cyber storage resilience enables an enterprise to recover from a cyberattack, such as ransomware or malware, within a few minutes or few seconds. DEBATE #3 | Immutable to the Finish Line: True immutable snapshots of data with no backdoor vs. Semi-immutable snapshots of data with "backdoors" Many enterprises are using what they consider "immutable snapshots," but there is a problem. Those snapshots have a "backdoor." They are not truly "immutable." Someone could potentially hack in and change the data in the snapshots, which defeats the purpose of immutable snapshots, which are supposed to be unchangeable and undeletable. For the best in cyber storage resiliency, as well as corporate regulatory and compliance issues, an enterprise should be using truly immutable snapshots that cannot be altered or deleted. There should not be a "backdoor" to the snapshots. This may sound so basic, but the trade-off that IT teams make can be startling. Or an IT team may not even know there is a backdoor to the snapshots. What they really need is high-end enterprise storage capabilities for cyber storage resilience. DEBATE #4 | The Uptime Challenge: 100% availability vs. 6 9's availability When the enterprise storage infrastructure goes down or is unexpectedly interrupted - even for a short period of time - it can cost an enterprise a significant loss of revenue and profits, as well as cause reputational damage. This is why ultra-high availability is so important. However, the debate is about how "high" does the availability of the enterprise storage infrastructure need to be. Can an enterprise get away with less than 100% availability? The reality is that applications and workloads in enterprise environments are in use almost all enterprises 24x7x365. Thus, both high availability and high performance are critical to daily business operations - hallmarks of the right high-end enterprise storage. DEBATE #5 | Head-to-Head: Guaranteed SLAs vs. No guarantees It's a "no-brainer." Enterprises are accustomed to service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee their system, software, or service will deliver the performance and the results for which the organization has signed up. It's no different in enterprise storage and next generation of data protection. It's exceedingly more advantageous to the company to have guarantees in place, such as guaranteed 100% availability, guaranteed performance, and guaranteed cyber recovery. Guarantees remove the guesswork. About Eric Herzog Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat, a Lenovo company. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of Global Storage Channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMC's Enterprise & Mid-range Systems Division, and CMO and Senior VP of Alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory. FOR UK MEDIA OUTREACH Basically this blog - https://www.infinidat.com/en/blog/great-debates-enterprise-storage-part-one More thought leadership style, so product names etc. stripped out FACTS have been removed to keep it neutral

ExaGrid, Huawei and Infinidat reap DCIG backup appliance awards. Chris Mellor STORAGE EDITOR Blocks & Files editor Published wed 22 Jul 2026 // 13:00 UTC Jerome Wendt's Data Center Intelligence Group (DCIG) has produced a 5-edition DCIG TOP 5 Cyber Resilient PBBAs report which features ExaGrid, Huawei and Infinidat. PBBAs are Purpose-Built Backup Appliances and the 5 editions are; * All-Flash Edition - evaluated 14 appliances * Global Edition - evaluated 14 appliances * US Edition - evaluates 30 appliances * 3PB+ Logical Global - evaluated 21 appliances * 3PB+ Logical US - evaluated 19 appliances DCIG says "Enterprises have historically measured purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs) based on how well they minimally deliver on the following four features; backup and restore throughput or performance, high data reduction or deduplication ratios, support for backup acceleration protocols, and total storage capacity. "These evaluation criteria remain in place... However, achieving high deduplication ratios or backup throughput rates matters little if ransomware has deleted or encrypted backups. This has resulted in cyber resilience becoming a fifth criterion that enterprises evaluate and expect PBBAs to possess." The split between all-flash and hybrid or all-disk products is logical as ingest and restore speeds will differ markedly between these two product categories. Products from some suppliers, such as Huawei, are not available in the USA, hence a split into US and global editions. The logical capacity criterion is new. DCIG notes that it "used logical storage capacity for the first time in evaluating PBBAs. It did so based on the fact that all the evaluated PBBAs support compression, deduplication, and at least one data protection optimized protocol. Based on their universal support of these technologies, all these PBBAs should achieve at least a 12:1 data reduction ratio in many backup use cases. This 3 PB+ Logical Cyber Resilient Global Edition specifically covers those models that offer at least 250 TBs of usable storage capacity and no more than three (3) petabytes of usable storage capacity." In fact, "The three petabytes (PB) of logical storage capacity represents the low end of what any of the evaluated PBBAs can achieve when fully configured with storage capacity. Individual PBBAs, or those in scale-out configurations, may scale to much higher logical storage capacities." The reports are purchasable from DCIG's website and, as we have not seen them, we don't know which suppliers were included in the evaluations, nor do we have a full list of the top five suppliers in each edition. However, ExaGrid, Huawei, and Infinidat have each announced their presence in some of the editions, with ExaGrid and Infinidat making report extracts available off their websites. ExaGrid. The EX540-SSD product gets a Top 5 Cyber Resilient PBBAs - All-Flash Edition award and a Top 5 Cyber Resilient PBBAs - Global Edition edition award. The EX189 gets a Top 5 Cyber Resilient PBBAs - 3PB+ Logical Global Edition award. Huawei. In the All-Flash Edition category, Huawei's OceanProtect X9000 Backup Appliance ranked No. 1 among the top 5 PBBAs for its excellent recovery performance. And, in the 3PB+ Logical Global Edition category, Huawei OceanProtect X6000 Backup Appliance ranked No. 1 among the top 5 PBBAs for its outstanding cost-effectiveness. The OceanStor Protect product line features seven products, including the X8100 and X9100 which were introduced in May, along with the hardware compression card with an up to 90:1 reduction ratio. Huawei says it will enhance both backup efficiency and data resilience as it develops these products. Infinidat. Lenovo-owned Infinidat says its InfiniGuard B4312 system achieved a Top 5 3 PB+ Logical Global Edition award. CMO Eric Herzog said: "We're excited to see the InfiniGuard continue to be recognized as one of the top purpose-built backup appliances in the world." The InfiniGuard system is based in the InfiniBox array with an InfiniSafe cyber-resilience SW suite. A Neural Cache SW feature, the report says, "tracks backup patterns. It learns how enterprises backup and restore data, so it can make future restores much faster." Well-known PBBA suppliers include Dell Technologies, HPE, and Quantum. One or more of them will likely be included in this set of DCIG Top 5 PBBA reports. To find out any more about DCIG's views on PBBA products and suppliers though, you'll need to pony up dollars to DCIG. It has a free trial, a $495 individual seat annual subscription on its web site, and a multi-seat licence with pricing on request.