VAST Data unveils its universal storage architecture to bring an end to the enterprise HDD and storage tiering era

As part of the launch, VAST Data has raised $80 million of funding in two rounds, backed by Norwest Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, 83 North, Goldman Sachs and a TPG Growth-sponsored investment platform. The announcement of this funding comes on the heels of VAST completing its first quarter of operation where it has experienced historic customer adoption and product sales. Since releasing the product for general availability in November of 2018, VAST's bookings have significantly outpaced the fastest growing enterprise technology companies in history.

"Storage has always been complicated. Organisations for decades have been dealing with a complex pyramid of technologies that force some tradeoff between performance and capacity", stated Renen Hallak, founder & CEO of VAST Data. "VAST Data was founded to break this and many other long-standing trade-offs. By applying new thinking to many of the toughest problems, we are working to simplify how customers store and access vast reserves of data in real time, leading to insights that were not possible before."

VAST Data invented a new type of storage architecture from the ground up to exploit technologies such as NVMe over fabrics, Storage Class Memory (SCM) and low-cost QLC flash, that weren't available until 2018. The result is an exabyte-scale, all-NVMe flash, disaggregated shared-everything (DASE) architecture that breaks from the idea that scalable storage needs to be built as shared-nothing clusters. This architecture enables global algorithms that deliver game-changing levels of storage efficiency and system resilience.

Some of the significant breakthroughs of VAST's Universal Storage platform include:

• Exabyte-Scale, 100 Percent Persistent Global Namespace: Each server has access to all of the media in the cluster, eliminating the need for expensive DRAM-based acceleration or HDD tiering, ensuring that every read and write is serviced by fast NVMe media. Servers are loosely coupled in the VAST architecture and can scale to near-infinite numbers because they don't need to coordinate I/O with each other. They are also not encumbered by any cluster cross-talk that is often challenging to shared-nothing architectures. VAST servers can be containerized and embedded into application servers to bring NVMe over Fabrics performance to every host.
• Global QLC Flash Translation: The VAST DASE architecture is optimized for the unique and challenging way that new low-cost, low-endurance QLC media must be written to. By employing new application-aware data placement methods in conjunction with a large SCM write buffer, VAST’s Universal Storage can extract unnaturally high levels of longevity from low-endurance QLC flash and enable low-cost flash systems to be deployed for over 10 years.
• Global Data Protection: VAST's new Global Erasure Codes have broken an age-old trade-off between the cost of data protection and a system’s resilience. With VAST's breakthrough work on data protection algorithms, storage gets more resilient as clusters grow while data protection overhead is as low as just two percent, compared to 33 to 66 percent for traditional systems.
• Similarity-Based Data Reduction: VAST has invented a new form of data reduction that is both global and byte-granular. The system discovers and exploits patterns of data similarity across a global namespace at a level of granularity that is 4,000 to 128,000 times smaller than today's deduplication approaches. The net result is a system that realizes dramatic efficiency advantages on unstructured data, structured data and backup data without compromising the access speeds that customers expect from all-NVMe flash technology.

There are three ways that customers can deploy VAST Data's Universal Storage platform: a turnkey server and storage cluster appliance, storage plus VAST container software that runs on customer machines, or software only. Whatever the deployment model, customers enjoy significant benefits from VAST's synthesis of storage innovations, including:

• Flash Performance at Hard Disk Cost: All applications, from artificial intelligence to backup, can be served by flash, increasing performance without increasing the cost of capacity
• Massive Scalability: Customers no longer need to move and manage their data across a complicated collection of storage systems. Everything can be available from a single 'source of truth' in real-time. VAST's Universal Storage is easier to manage and administer, and becomes more reliable and efficient as it scales.
• New Insights: With this increased flexibility and scalability, there are new opportunities to analyze and achieve insights from vast reserves of data.
• A Data Center in a Rack: Customers can now house dozens of petabytes in a single rack, providing significant reductions in the amount of floor space, power and cooling needed.
• 10-Year Investment Protection: With VAST Data's 10-year endurance warranty, customers can now deploy QLC flash with peace of mind. VAST's DASE architecture enables better investment amortization than legacy HDD architectures which need to be replaced every three to five years, while also eliminating the need to perform complex data migrations.