CIO Bulletin

VAST Data – Enabling One Consolidated Flash Cloud for all Data Storage Needs

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things technology, IOT terminal equipments collect a large amount of data. So the preprocessing and storage become a big challenge. Universal Storage is a single storage system that is fast enough for primary storage, scalable enough for huge datasets and affordable enough to use for the full range of a customer's data, thus eliminating the tyranny of tiers.

VAST Data is a software company bringing an end to complex storage tiering and unlocking the ability to use flash across the enterprise. Since they started shipping customer-ready systems in late 2018, VAST has established itself as the fastest-selling storage company in history. VAST marries innovative new algorithms on top of new hardware and network technologies to completely change the calculus of flash ownership and to eliminate the economic arguments for mechanical media. Over time, the VAST Data story will weave through multiple facets of systems and infrastructure across the data center. Throughout all of its endeavors, simplicity and acceleration will always remain the VAST Data North Star. VAST delivers real-time performance to all data and overcomes the historic cost barriers to building all-flash data centers. Since its launch in February 2019, VAST has become the fastest-selling infrastructure startup in history.

Providing Unique and Innovative Universal Storage Solutions

Data Analytics: As the modern data science stack continues to evolve, the motivations that previously drove organizations to adopt Direct Attached Storage (DAS) systems such as Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) have evolved. Enterprises continue to embrace real-time computing tools such as Apache Spark, Trino, and Elasticsearch, shifting away from batch-oriented tools of the Hadoop era. VAST breaks these trade-offs with its unique Disaggregated and Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, and provides a highly scalable and affordable all-flash, file and object platform that allows you to run petabyte and exabyte scale analysis at less than half of the cost of traditional all-flash solutions, while being many times faster.

AI & Machine Learning: Recent advances in machine and deep learning are moving GPU driven artificial intelligence applications from R&D labs and Silicon Valley startups into the computing mainstream. AI is presenting a new set of storage challenges that IT organizations have never had to deal with. VAST combines the single-host performance and scalability of a parallel file system with the simplicity of an all Flash NAS appliance. By marrying the performance of Flash with economics that are otherwise only found in HDD-based archive storage, VAST enables AI applications to consolidate infrastructure and accelerate the training and inference time.

Backup and Restore: VAST Data and Commvault partner to provide a comprehensive all-flash data protection solution that delivers rapid backup and restore for organizations seeking to protect data from looming cyber threats, disasters, or rogue employees. Combining VAST Data’s all-flash Universal Storage solution with Commvault’s Complete Data Protection platform enables organizations to instantly recover from any data loss scenario at a cost comparable to hard drive economics. VAST combines QLC flash, revolutionary data reduction, and highly efficient erasure codes to bring flash to price points suitable for backup, allowing customers to combine Commvault’s backup orchestration and data management engine with VAST’s unified all-flash file and object storage platform. VAST and Commvault deliver complementary data reduction capabilities to further drive optimal enterprise performance, efficiency, and TCO.

Universal Storage for Containers: When they first became popular, containers were used mostly for stateless operations such as web servers like Nginix. As container frameworks and orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes, become a bigger part of the modern application agenda, organizations have expanded their use to also power databases and other stateful applications. With its entirely new disaggregated and shared everything storage architecture (DASE), VAST Data’s Universal Storage combines the speed of all-flash with the economics that were only previously associated with hard drive-based storage systems. VAST’s exabyte-scale storage technology breaks decades-old storage tradeoffs to make it possible to build a single container storage class that is both fast and affordable. With added support for QOS and RDMA (over Ethernet or InfiniBand), VAST’s persistent NFS-backed volumes couple the simplicity of a NAS with the speeds only otherwise found in all-flash SAN storage.

Meet the Leader

Renen Hallak is the Founder and Chief executive Officer of VAST Data. Prior to founding VAST, Renen led the architecture and development of an all flash array at XtremIO, from inception to over a billion dollars in revenue while acting as VP R&D and leading a team of over 200 engineers. XtremIO is the world's leading all flash array, with over 40% market share and unprecedented growth from zero to three billion dollars of revenue in under three years.

Earlier Renen developed a content distribution system at Intercast, from inception to initial deployment and acted as Chief Architect. Renen was also a member of the CTO team at Time to Know. He holds a BA and an MSc in Computer Science, both summa cum laude. Thesis published in the journal of Computational Complexity and presented at the Theory of Cryptography Conference.