CIO Bulletin

VAST Data – Revolutionizing Data Storage with Its Indigenously Built Universal Storage Facility

Every day organizations across diverse industries and across four continents are more and more modernizing their analytics, content, computing and AI infrastructure with Universal Storage. 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 customers data, thus eliminating the tyranny of tiers.

VAST Data is one such company that is simplifying the data center and redefining how organizations interact with data with its Universal Storage concept. Since its inception, the company is shipping customer-ready systems and has established itself as the fastest-selling storage company in history. It breaks the decades-old tradeoff between storage performance and capacity with a new storage architecture that enables unlimited processing on affordable flash, at up to Exabyte scale. VAST delivers all-flash performance at the cost of hard drives through QLC flash protection, low-overhead erasure codes and revolutionary data reduction.

Factors that Makes VAST Data Unique

VAST is Democratizing Flash: In an ideal world, every application will be powered by flash. Until now, customers have never been able to afford a true, all-flash data center because the cost differences between hard drive and flash storage systems have been prohibitive. 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.

VAST is Consolidating the Stack to Unleash Insights: Once customers get to know that they can move beyond the hard drive, they also realize that the same motivations that have driven organizations toward tiered and complex storage architectures also no longer apply. VAST’s Universal Storage combines Exabyte levels of scalability with multi-tenant quality of service tools in order to make it possible to consolidate all data and all applications onto one scale-out tier of flash. Everything is simple when you no longer need to move data across silos of infrastructure.

One Core Value—Innovation: Its team of innovators applies unconventional thinking in order to achieve new orders of application and operational value. 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.

Leveraging Unique yet Significant Universal Storage Platform for Various Sectors

Universal Storage for Animation and VFX: Animation and VFX studios use rendering tools to shape today’s most compelling content. From classic rendering and compositing workflows to new virtual reality content development efforts, creative teams are always leveraging modern infrastructure to blur the line between reality and fiction. Here, I/O performance can directly correlate to the speed of content production by making both server farms more efficient with their time. To train these new models, organizations are finding that they need to provide high speed access to their content archives for high-throughput computation is a challenge for organizations who have kept their largest data sets on the slowest storage. With VAST Data, animations studios and FX shops can finally afford flash for all of their render data. Once flash can be affordable for the pipeline, render farms can deliver at up to 10x times faster performance than HDD-based scale-out storage.

Universal Storage for Life Sciences: Life science organizations have long been challenged by ever-growing data and processing demands which strain current storage systems not only to hold back the deluge of data volume but also to provide sufficient performance to keep up as toolkits evolve how pipelines access and interact with data. VAST breaks the decades-old storage performance and capacity tradeoff to enable bioinformatics applications at any scale to benefit from the speed, IO consistency, and simplicity of all-flash parallel file system storage.

Universal Storage for Media and Broadcast: Media production and broadcast studios are being squeezed by the performance demands of 4K, 8K and even higher-resolution video formats as well as the cost of housing their ever-growing content archives. What’s more, at a time where archived data must be quickly repurposed to satisfy new business requirements – the performance of yesterday’s archive is falling short of the pace of production needed for the age of streaming.

By combining the consistent performance of all-flash and the economics of archive storage systems, VAST Data’s Universal Storage allows media companies to break the long-standing tradeoff between capacity and performance that has complicated media workflows for decades. With VAST, studios can now consolidate their production and archive requirements into a single, easy-to-manage namespace that can scale to exabytes, provides quality of service for each aspect of the workflow – all while supporting hundreds of 4K video streams or high-scale rendering requirements. This new approach to scalable storage accelerates the ability to repurpose content and monetize archived assets through OTT networks, media compilations and the ever-popular director’s cuts.

Universal Storage for AI and 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. Customers need to keep GPU servers fed with more bandwidth than what a NAS can deliver, causing them to think that complex parallel file systems are the only answer. On the other hand, file accesses are small and random in nature, making AI the killer use case for flash storage – but parallel file systems and burst buffers were never designed for providing random read access to petabytes of flash. As AI becomes democratized, niche HPC storage products are difficult for enterprise IT organizations to adopt and operationalize on a broad basis.

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.

Universal Storage for Quantitative Trading: Banks and hedge funds have struggled to keep pace with the needs of their quant researchers because of the inefficiencies of mechanical media and the classic tiered-storage data management model. When insights are dependent on rotational media, portfolio managers lose the ability to maximize alpha. VAST breaks the decades-old storage performance and capacity tradeoff to enable at-scale processing of market data and train AI data sets at any scale. With VAST Universal Storage, all of your market data archive can be stored on one tier of scalable, affordable flash – making it possible to backtest and train all trading models in real time.

The Ardent Visionary behind the Success of VAST Data

Renen Hallak is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of VAST Data. Prior to founding VAST, he 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.

Mr. Hallak 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.