It's been about seven months since Infinidat launched our on-premises S3-compatible object storage service with InfuzeOS™ 8.5 back in January 2026, and with our latest update it's a good time to bring you up to speed on where S3 in InfuzeOS stands - and where it's headed next.

If you've followed our file storage story, you already know the pattern: we don't chase every feature checkbox in the industry. We wait until Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise customers tell us, clearly and repeatedly, what they actually need, and then we build it right rather than building it first. Object storage was no different. Our customers running S3-based backup targets, cloud-native applications, and data lakes on public cloud or third-party appliances kept asking the same question: “why can't we get that same S3 interface, with the same InfuzeOS reliability, availability, cyber resilience, and performance I already trust for block and file, on-premises?” So, we built it.

Why On-Premises S3, and Why Now

The S3 API has effectively become the lingua franca for object storage, not because it originated at AWS, but because the entire ecosystem - backup software, analytics platforms, AI/ML pipelines, archival tools - has standardized around it. Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise customers didn't want another proprietary object interface bolted onto their enterprise storage environment. They wanted the same API contract they already use in the cloud, but running in their own, secure data centers, under their own control, with their own data sovereignty, governance, and latency requirements. InfuzeOS S3 gives them exactly that: a fully S3-compatible service running natively within InfuzeOS, backed by the same Neural Cache architecture and the same 100% availability, performance, and cyber guarantees that our customers leverage for their block and file deployments. Since the S3 object, block, and file protocols are all native to our InfuzeOS and is so easy to deploy, many of our customers are using all three protocols on their InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA G4 solutions.

Metadata Performance: Where Object Storage Usually Falls Apart

Anyone who has run object storage at scale knows the dirty secret of the S3 API: LIST is brutal. It's a metadata-heavy operation, and most object storage platforms - especially ones built by bolting an S3 gateway onto a general-purpose backend - start to buckle once bucket sizes climb into the hundreds of millions or billions of objects. Listings slow to a crawl, backup jobs time out, and applications that need to enumerate objects quickly simply can't.

We took a different approach. Because InfuzeOS S3 is built on Infinidat’s metadata engine, rather than layered on top of a generic file system or a bolted-on database, we've been able to push LIST performance to more than a million objects listed per second. That's not a number pulled from a lab corner case. It's the kind of performance that makes a real difference for enterprise backup software doing catalog verification, for data pipelines scanning buckets before a job kicks off, and for any application that treats "list my objects" as a routine, not exceptional, operation.

Backup Certifications: Commvault and Veeam

Object storage's biggest and most immediate use case in the enterprise today is as an immutable backup target, and we knew that credibility here would come down to certifications, not claims. Infinidat’s InfuzeOS S3 has achieved compatibility certification from both Commvault and Veeam for use as an S3-based backup target, including support for Object Lock and retention. That means Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise customers running either of these platforms can point their backup repositories at an InfiniBox with the same confidence they'd have pointing at a public cloud bucket - except the data never leaves their data center, and the performance is consistent and predictable, rather than subject to internet egress and cloud API throttling.

Links to partner sites:

• CommVault: S3-Compatible Vendors, Storage Vendors supporting Object Lock
• Veeam Ready Object: Primary Target, Capacity Target, Capacity Target with Immutability

What's in our latest InfuzeOS release: Versioning and Object Lock

The next milestone is in our latest version, InfuzeOS 8.8, where we have general availability of Bucket Versioning and Object Lock for InfuzeOS S3.

Versioning means customers can protect against accidental overwrites and deletions by retaining prior versions of an object, rather than losing them the moment a new PUT comes in. It's foundational for any serious enterprise data protection strategy, and it's also a prerequisite for a lot of what Object Lock does.

Object Lock is where things get interesting for cyber resilience. We're delivering both Governance and Compliance modes, so customers can choose the right posture for their environment - Governance mode for teams that need flexibility with privileged override capability, and Compliance mode for environments where not even an administrator can shorten a retention period or delete a locked object before it expires, satisfying strict regulatory and audit requirements. Alongside that, we're adding Legal Hold, so objects can be preserved indefinitely, independent of any retention timer, whenever litigation or an investigation demands it.

Put together, Versioning, Object Lock, and Legal Hold turn InfuzeOS S3 into a true immutable, tamper-proof backup and archive target; not just S3-compatible in name, but ready to stand in for ransomware-resilient, compliance-grade object storage wherever a customer needs it.

Beyond Backup: Object Storage on the Factory Floor

One of the use cases that has genuinely surprised even us is manufacturing. A Global Fortune 500 technology manufacturer has deployed InfuzeOS S3 to support their global factory applications, the kind of environment where object storage isn't an afterthought for archival data, but an active part of the production process, ingesting and serving data generated on the factory floor itself. It's a good reminder that once you make an S3-compatible interface fast and reliable enough, applications show up in places you didn't originally design for. Backup and data protection may be the obvious first wave for on-premises object storage, but it's rarely the last.

Where Is InfuzeOS Object Storage Headed

We've followed the same playbook with S3 that we followed with NFS and SMB: launch with a solid, fully compatible core, listen closely to what Global Fortune 500 and large enterprise customers building real workloads on top of it need next, and ship those capabilities as fast as we responsibly can. Metadata performance and backup certifications got InfuzeOS S3 taken seriously as an enterprise-grade target in its first year. Versioning, Object Lock, and Legal Hold make it an ideal component for immutable, compliance-driven enterprise data protection deployments. And if a large manufacturer running factory applications on it clearly indicates, this is only the beginning of where InfuzeOS S3 will be installed.

With InfuzeOS S3, InfiniBox® G4 supports diverse block, file, and S3 object storage workloads and use cases, simplifying the deployment of modern IT infrastructures to support structured and unstructured data in a single platform. If you thought InfiniBox was just block and file, it's time to update that picture again.

With over 25 years in enterprise storage, Ishraq is a technologist and former developer now serving as Senior Product Manager for File & Object Storage at Infinidat, a Lenovo company. He works closely with R&D and customers to deliver innovative features for the InfiniBox platform, shaping the future of large-scale data management. Previously, Ishraq excelled as a Technical Advisor at Infinidat, supporting global petabyte-scale mission-critical deployments. Prior to joining Infinidat, Ishraq held leadership and engineering roles at Dell and EMC, leading technical teams and driving product strategy for network attached storage. Ishraq holds an M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science, and an MBA in New Product Development and Technology Commercialization. His passion for solving complex storage challenges and delivering customer-focused solutions continues to drive his work in the evolving data storage landscape.