Render at the speed of flash and spend at the cost of an archive, with dedicated quality of service for specific applications: VAST

We’re not deploying data centers the way we used to. There are important new options to consider in infrastructure design, and an important one is all-flash storage. Research from IDC predicts that service providers will continue to break new ground in search of both performance gains and cost reductions as they expand their cloud implementations. Remember, as data center utilization increases, so do requirements for power and cooling. And that’s where data center leaders are getting creative. In an ideal world, every application would 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. Once customers realize 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.

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 and creatives more efficient with their time. Fast forward to 2020… and rendering workflows are now being exposed to new machine learning and deep learning frameworks to automate much of the creative process by programmatically learning from artistic behaviors. To train these new models, organizations are finding that they need to provide high speed access to their content archives for high-throughput computation… 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.

The pyramid is dead

Large render farms have historically employed a number of storage systems and tiering strategies to balance cost and performance. As the transactional I/O workloads in render farms has outstripped the capability traditional scale-out NAS systems, studios have even band-aided these shortcomings by deploying exotic solutions such as file system caching appliances. As these legacy NAS vendors have added flash tiers to their systems, the expense of these solutions has left customers still struggling to balance performance and capacity. Whether cached or tiered, these complex datasets invariably bottleneck rendering pipelines as applications need to access data that’s in a subordinate tier of storage. All the while, archived content has become so much more important as studios look to monetize content assets in the age of streaming services. Anymore, the idea of an ‘archive’ is unacceptable for adaptive media organizations who now demand the ability to respond to content requirements in real time. The complications of legacy NAS are on a collision course with AI and streaming requirements in modern rendering environments.  To solve this problem, a new approach to storage architecture is required.

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. Life science teams have long struggled to balance I/O performance with the volume of data generated by bioinformatics pipelines. To address this, data is often tiered across a complex, pyramidal hierarchy of storage systems, each designed to provide either fast I/O or large capacity. While this pyramid of storage partially solves some organization’s storage problems by relegating cold data to slow, archival storage; scientists continue to evolve the questions they ask of their data. Since it is impossible to process and analyze data that’s been exiled to slow, archival storage – the opportunity for rapid scientific discovery on vast reserves of data is lost. At the same time, larger pools of data create new opportunities to find new correlations – but as of now, it has not been economically practical to store the entire life science research corpus on one fast tier of Flash.

Renen Hallak, CEO and Founder

“Our team of innovators applies unconventional thinking in order to achieve new orders of application and operational value.”