Unprecedented times in IT might be the understatement of the century. There are so many things in the technology world that have been disrupted by the current tech trends. Trying to solve a big problem means breaking it down into manageable chunks. We have all heard the term: “You can’t boil the ocean,” although it seems many are trying to do that! Let’s focus on one very critical “chunk” that, for decades past and into the future, has been a keystone of every business and its associated technology challenges in running it.
No one should be surprised that the advent of AI is the biggest part of this. AI, or claims around AI, are in absolutely everything, everywhere! There is a massive expenditure to support all of this. Gartner says that $2.52 TRILLION will be spent on AI in 2026, growing to $3.33 TRILLION in 2027¹. The major hyper-scalers alone are expected to spend $650 billion on AI and the technology to empower AI applications and workloads.
This shift is creating challenges on multiple levels across the data center. The two at the top of the list are the increased demand for power and floor space. And in recent months, the new third dynamic is the dramatic shift in costs driven by a massive increase in worldwide demand for silicon, particularly for memory and storage silicon. Massive amounts of DRAM and Flash Storage are required to support AI workloads. Also, the storage components in those servers have stretched component producers to the absolute limit. Component Producers (of DRAM and SSDs/Flash) have stated that they are not building or bringing on more production. As a result, the cost per MB, GB, TB, or PB of Flash storage capacity has skyrocketed. This is challenging every IT budget worldwide! Here is what this means: NAND flash costs doubled in the second half of 2025, a trend widely reported by major supply chain analysts and storage vendors. Current estimates indicate that flash wafer costs for 1TB QLC/TLC jumped by 25% in a single month this year. Overall, pricing has surged by as much as 300% since the upward trend began in 2025. Having said that, how do we (Infinidat, a Lenovo company) help IT customers address this very difficult situation? Luckily, we have options that should be strongly considered when trying to optimize for all three challenges mentioned above. Let’s look at each of these and how we help from a data storage perspective.
Data center space:
With all the new server infrastructure, especially for the buildout of AI deployments, being put in place, floor space is at a premium; every inch of data center space is being allocated, and there is pressure to find more ways to maximize and use existing floor tile space. We directly address this with a powerful consolidation capability. Our proven enterprise storage solutions continue to provide new and existing customers with tremendous value by delivering the proven capability to consolidate workloads and the associated storage they run on, reducing floor space, power/cooling, and carbon footprint!
Our customers have consolidated workloads previously located on legacy storage from almost every major storage vendor across major industries to Infinidat systems. How? With an architecture that does exactly what it says it will do. Read about why architecture matters in the blog here: Architecture Matters: 3 is way better than 2!². A customer in the financial/insurance industry did an initial consolidation project, replacing 281 floor tiles of competitors' arrays to just 61 with our solutions. At the same time, they increased the performance and availability of those workloads, resulting in over $10 million in savings in the first two years alone. Eliminating storage sprawl is another major benefit of consolidating workloads on Infinidat. Over time, organizations deploy solutions that don’t scale end up, with many silos of storage systems to address the needs of multiple workloads. This is caused by poor performance at scale. We directly address that and will guarantee the performance and 100% availability of those consolidated workloads.
Power/Cooling:
New servers loaded with GPUs are gulping down every watt of power they can get their hands on, stressing the supply/demand curve of every electrical utility. Add to that: additional highly optimized networking, other peripheral components, and you can see why the demand adds up quickly. This significantly increases the operational expenses organizations face, especially as power costs have risen substantially in the past few years, and shows no indication of coming down.
Consolidation has a dramatic impact on this as well. When you can power PBs of storage in a single rack and consolidate the footprint of several smaller arrays, costs go down. Each smaller system has its own controllers, power supplies, networking, and management needs. This is a direct, inevitable outcome of the data center storage sprawl created by deploying these types of products to address growing workload needs over time. As an example of how effective we can be, let’s assume we are consolidating three (3) arrays from a popular midrange architecture vendor. Using their public data on power, we can see a savings of 3 to 1! We also benefit you by giving you better capacity utilization because midrange architectures tend to become controller bound well before capacities are utilized.
Additionally, the competitor's STaaS strategy often worsens data center storage sprawl by removing your control over the underlying infrastructure. Because they own the asset, they choose the hardware—which may be repurposed, rather than new—as long as it technically satisfies your contracted capacity and performance SLAs.
Direct Cost of Flash/DRAM:
Every enterprise storage solutions need DRAM, so there isn’t much that can be done on this front, because it basically “is what it is.” But there are options for rethinking the underlying storage devices in an array and optimizing data center storage. Our industry has made an “all-in” shift to all-flash storage. For Infinidat, we, too, have industry acclaimed all-flash storage platforms, but, unlike many others, we have not abandoned our award-winning hybrid storage solutions. That, coupled with our outstanding architecture and features like SSA Express, gives Infinidat a set of unique capabilities that others don’t. Let’s be clear, what we are saying is to use the “Right Tool for the Job,” be that a hybrid array or an all-flash array.
Infinidat has the solution that comes to the rescue, Remember, we have all-flash options with much smaller footprints to go along with our rack-scale solutions, which may be suitable for scenarios where extreme performance is required. The direct impact of supply chain instability and surging NAND pricing has, for the time being, eliminated the economic advantage of high-density QLC storage for many projects. While our all-flash arrays remain the performance leaders, our hybrid systems are built to deliver strong IOPS and latency metrics that are often faster than our rivals' all-flash configurations. How, you ask? Architecture matters… if you didn’t read the link above, go back and do so. Our industry-leading multi-patented, proprietary technologies—including Neural Cache, InfiniRAID®, and Trie data structures—work in tandem with the advanced features built into InfuzeOS™ to deliver that level of high performance even for hybrid array configurations. Then, there is SSA Express, a dedicated performance tier within our hybrid arrays that enables you to selectively place specific workloads on flash, delivering true "all-flash" performance from within a hybrid system. While capacity varies depending on your specific configuration, SSA Express allows you to isolate your most critical workloads on flash for top-tier performance, while significantly reducing costs by keeping general-purpose data on high-density disk. This Forbes article claims the price of SSD capacity is over 20x HDD storage capacity.³ Ultimately, when all this is factored together, you can see upwards to a 35% price delta in between all-flash and hybrid solutions. Enough said, the data speaks for itself. Our goal is to provide the right solutions to bridge the gap and manage this cost crisis. projected to continue for the next 18-24 months.
Other Costs:
The other costs impacting enterprise storage configurations are very real and affect the solution's overall cost over time. Is the system available? Can I manage it effectively with substantially less IT staff? Does it save me power and cooling costs and data center space? Can I really leverage both flash and HDD to create cost-effective solutions that really save me money? The answer to all of these questions is yes, with Infinidat! We recently engaged IDC to conduct a study with several Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise Infinidat customers on the business value of our InfiniBox® G4 solutions, and the results are outstanding. IDC found that all the customers surveyed for the study were using both all-flash and hybrid InfiniBox G4 solutions, and they told us it was unavoidable not to consider the value of the combination. The IDC whitepaper on “The Business Value of Infinidat InfiniBox Storage⁴” is HERE. The numbers don’t lie; the results speak for themselves.
Unprecedented AI demands don't have to mean uncontrollable IT costs. By consolidating your infrastructure and leveraging Infinidat's intelligent hybrid storage solutions, you can beat the skyrocketing prices of all-flash arrays, while reclaiming valuable power and floor space. Should all-flash be what is needed for certain workloads, we have an award-winning all-flash array with the InfiniBox™ SSA G4. Let us show you how our advanced architecture and "white-glove" support and service will turn these market challenges into a competitive advantage, creating a long-term partnership rooted in unrivaled performance, availability, and cyber storage resilience.
To watch our on-demand deep dive, “Maximize Value in a Volatile Storage Market,” click here.
¹ Gartner Press Release: Jan 15, 2026
² https://www.infinidat.com/en/blog/architecture-matters-3-way-better-2
⁴ https://www.infinidat.com/en/resource-pdfs/white-paper-idc-business-value-infinibox.pdf
Bill Basinas is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Infinidat, a Lenovo company, and has been in the storage industry since 1994. Experienced and deeply knowledgeable in all aspects of primary and secondary storage platforms and associated data protection and cyber storage protection technologies. Having worked for EMC, HPE, Legato and Avamar (both acquired by EMC) and a number of other startup companies in technical/engineering, sales and marketing, in manager and individual contributor roles, he brings a unique understanding of technology and marketing to the storage industry.