Infinidat has announced a Data Rescue Program for IBM customers concerned by Big Blue’s shutdown of its storage innovation centre.
Infinidat developed the programme in response to what it described as an influx of inquiries from IBM customers regarding escalating pressure to transition from high-end to lower-end storage and reports of layoffs across the high-end storage division.
Stan Zaffos, senior vice president at Infinidat said: “IBM created the high-end storage market, but aside from its commitment to storage for z/OS mainframes, layoffs at their Tel Aviv development center and their lack of architectural innovation together show an apparent lack of commitment to the open systems storage market. The company’s reliance on obsolescent storage architectures and their willingness to lay off developers, most recently its XIV and A9000 developers, has left many IBM storage customers searching for an exit strategy.
“IBM has been prioritizing stock buybacks over core R&D investment for the past decade. Leadership in capital-intensive sectors such as cloud and enterprise data storage are not possible under these conditions. For this reason, we are providing a no-cost, no-risk, migration onto InfiniBox, today’s gold standard in easy-to-use petabyte-scale storage systems.”
As part of the programme, every IBM customer, globally, with an active support contract for A9000/R, XIV, or other IBM storage solutions, is eligible for no-charge data migration to InfiniBox. The InfiniBox FLX program provides ultra-high performance, simple pay-as-you-go pricing, a 100 percent availability guarantee, and free total hardware refresh every three years — for life. To further mitigate risk, Infinidat said it will also provide the data migration services to InfiniBox or InfiniBox FLX at no charge for most installations.
