CIO Bulletin

VAST Data is democratizing fast access to all data

VAST Data’s mission is to bring an end to decades of complexity and application bottlenecks. They combine a series of innovations to radically change the flash cost vs capacity equation, democratizing the utility of flash for all data and all applications. The result: no more slow and failure-prone hard drives, no more complex storage tiers. What’s left is nothing but a dramatically simplified and universal storage experience where applications benefit from being able to store and access all of their data in real time.

Since VAST started shipping customer-ready systems in late 2018, they have established themselves as the fastest-selling storage company in history. Every day, organizations across diverse industries and across five continents are more and more modernizing their analytics, content, computing and AI infrastructure with Universal Storage.

It all starts with democratizing flash

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.

Consolidating the stack to unleash insights

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.

Together, VAST shares one core value: innovation

VAST’s 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 their endeavors, simplicity and acceleration will always remain in their north star.

Render at the speed of flash…spend at the cost of an archive

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 better option: vast data universal storage

VAST Data 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. Universal Storage delivers numerous advantages for rendering:

All-Flash Storage Infrastructure: Render up to 10 times faster when all of your data is on flash.

Revolutionary Data Reduction for Rendering Data: Similarity-Based Data Reduction routinely delivers reduction of 2.5:1 in render pipelines.

NAS Simplicity: One scale-out namespace eliminates the need for client agents, tiering appliances, and other complications.

Multi-Tenant Infrastructure: VAST server pooling capability provides dedicated QoS for competing projects… dedicate front-end servers—and the performance they provide—to their most critical projects.

Archive Economics, 1/10th the Cost of Other Flash Approaches: VAST delivers all-flash performance at the cost of hard drives through QLC flash protection, low-overhead erasure codes and revolutionary data reduction.

Accelerated Storage for Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Saturate any GPU server with VAST’s simple, accelerated NAS offering.

Next-gen all-flash that takes the ‘work’ out of your workflows

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.

The media storage mess

Today’s media and broadcast studios deploy a complex mix of storage systems, each dedicated to a small set of applications in an organization’s workflow. In part, this is because traditional storage systems can not satisfy the different dimensions that these studios need to build toward:

Streaming storage for high-bandwidth editorial and playout applications
Transactional storage for rendering/VFX workflows
Large, low-cost storage for media archiving and VOD origin storage

The result is a veritable archipelago of storage islands and complex data migration policies that move and transform content across the data center. This pipeline, of course, is not uni-directional, once assets go to the archive they then have to be retrieved to active storage to start the process of content repurposing all over again.

A new approach to media workflows and archiving: vast data universal storage

VAST’s multi-protocol; exabyte-scale all-flash storage allows SMB, NFS, and S3 applications to access the same data in one tier, eliminating islands of storage and providing real-time access to all classes of content. This breakthrough storage platform enables media organizations to deploy a single system for everything from special effects rendering to feeding their internet streaming services, to archiving their most valuable media assets in a platform that delivers unmatched benefits:

All-Flash Infrastructure: Get predictable latency and high throughput to all stages of the pipeline.

Massive Scale-Out: Scale to thousands of editors, playout servers and render nodes all from a single, simple storage cluster — all with endless capacity.

A Multiprotocol Namespace: A unified data model that provides access to the same data over protocols such as NFS, SMB and S3.

The Scale and Portability of NFS: NFS volumes can be elastically scaled to petabytes while failover and volume sharing becoming easy.

SAN-Levels of Performance…over Ethernet: Direct up to 10GB/s of performance to each pod with RDMA-over-NFS.

Archive Economics: VAST has pioneered many innovations to democratize flash: QLC flash translation, low-overhead erasure codes and groundbreaking global data reduction.

Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO

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.