Vast Data Adds More Capabilities to Its Universal Storage Platform V 2.0

Vast Data has added accelerated support for AI applications and asymmetric cluster expansion to its Vast Data Universal Storage Platform V 2.0, giving users more tools to improve the performance and resiliency of their business data storage systems.

The new version, which comes 10 months after Vast announced the first version of the high-performance, all-flash NVMe, exabyte-scale platform, also includes a snapshot engine that runs continuously and allows users to take data storage snapshots without harming performance or losing data.

The accelerated support for AI feature is being added as an available option to allow customers to use RDMA acceleration for high bandwidth machine learning and deep learning applications, according to the company. The optional feature is expected to give customers more than 20GB/s of single-client performance when running either Ethernet or InfiniBand networks and delivers higher performance to ensure that applications are not starved for data.

The latest snapshot engine gives users a fine degree of granularity without compromising on performance, storage capacity or Flash drive wear, giving them deeper protections against accidental data deletion or ransomware tampering, according to the company.

Vast’s new asymmetric cluster expansion capabilities will allow users to add performance or capacity independently, without having to reconfigure other storage and data requirements.

Vast Data’s Jeff Denworth

Jeff Denworth, the co-founder of Vast and its vice president of products, said the new features in V 2.0 are designed to boost performance, reliability and flexibility for a wide range of data-hungry applications used by customers.

Spinnakar’s Gerard Brophy

Gerard Brophy, the managing director of Spinnakar, a U.K.-based Vast distributor, told Channel Futures that the latest version of Vast’s universal storage platform gives partners and customers more of the tools they will need to fully realize the concept of universal storage.

“Regardless of application performance demands, capacity or data protection requirements, partners now have a storage platform that simplifies what would otherwise be a very complicated set of tiered systems as well as massively reducing the cost of the idea of an all-flash data center for their customers,” said Brophy. “Now with unparalleled performance compared to other scale-out NAS solutions, the ability to deliver data protection through no-overhead snapshots as well as online cluster expansion capability, Spinnakar is very excited to be bringing the Vast Universal Storage architecture to the EMEA market.”

Storage Switzerland’s George Crump

George Crump, principal analyst with Storage Switzerland, said the improvements in the storage platform should be seen positively by customers and channel partners, especially when it comes to the enhanced snapshot capabilities, which he said will really help sales efforts.

So far, not a lot of channel partners are probably working with customers on projects that might involve the new acceleration for AI applications feature, he said, but the long term value of…

…being able to independently scale performance or capacity is very compelling for future use.

“Vast is a very compelling solution,” said Crump. “Their intelligent use of QLC and Optane is very clever. The product, to me, seems like an ideal fit for the channel, especially given Vast’s channel commitment. It gives resellers a significant price advantage over better known competitors, who have a reputation for taking deals direct.”

Vast Data came out of stealth mode in February and uses an exabyte-scale, all NVMe flash, disaggregated shared-everything (DASE) architecture and global algorithms to provide high storage efficiency and deep system resilience for customers.