New Israeli Storage Start-Up Just Discovered: Infinidat

Apparently born this year, storage start-up Infinidat Ltd. has a Web site under construction.

What do we know about it?

Infinidat is based in Herzliya, Israel and is officially involved in "hardware and software in the field of computerized data storage". There is apparently a relation between Infinidat and another totally unknown company named Xsignnet, Ltd. and based in the same city.

This company has already filed four interesting patents on:

• "A storage system comprises a permanent storage subsystem comprising a first cache memory and a non-volatile storage medium, and a storage control unit operatively coupled to said subsystem and to a second cache memory operable to cache ‘dirty’ data pending to be written to the permanent storage subsystem and to enable, responsive to at least one command by the control storage unit, destaging said ‘dirty’ data or part thereof to the permanent storage subsystem"
• "A method of allocating RAID group members in a mass storage system"
• A method for "caching in the cache memory a plurality of data portions matching a certain criterion"
• A "virtualized storage system" and "method of operating thereof"

These patents are signed by Alex Winokur, Haim Kopylovitz, Yechiel Yochai, Leo Corry and Julian Satran.

Dr. Alex Winokur is one of the more prolific inventor in the storage industry. He is the current CTO of Axxana. Prior to that, he was CTO of XIV Information Systems (acquired by IBM) and the founder of Sepaton (formerly SANgate). He spent eleven years in the IBM Research Division, achieving the IBM Master Inventor title, and authoring and co-authoring over 15 patents in storage, network management, and telecommunication areas.

Haim Kopylovitz is owner at Galit consulting services and was an EMC fellow.

Yechiel Yochai also was at EMC.

Julian Satran, originated from Romania, immigrated to Israel in 1979 and, since 1987, worked at IBM Research Laboratory at Haifa. He led several research projects in clustering, file system structure (and object storage), I/O and networking convergence (iSCSI).

The team included several software engineers or developers that worked for XIV and IBM, like Guy Rozendrom, Rotem Yaari, Zohar Zilverman and Gary W.? (we couldn’t find the last name). Nick Ioffe was at HP, Itay Szekely at LSI, Israel G.? worked at SANgate and Ido Ben-Tsion was co-founder of Israeli firm Tic Tac Data Recovery.