VAST Data

VAST Data is a technology company that focuses on data storage, specifically flash memory.[1][2] Founded in 2016, VAST has offices in the United States and Israel, with its headquarters in New York.[3] VAST Data was founded with the aim of replacing multiple storage tiers with one solid state platform.[4][5]

VAST Data
TypePrivately held company
IndustryData storage
FoundedJanuary 2016 (2016-01)
Headquarters
New York City
,
U.S.
Key people
Renen Hallak
Shachar Fienblit
Jeff Denworth
Mike Wing
Websitevastdata.com

VAST Data is being used by the National Institutes of Health and Harvard University to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as by Ginkgo Bioworks for genomic studies.[6][7]

History

VAST was founded in 2016 by Renen Hallak, a former engineer of R&D at XtremIO, Shachar Fienblit, formerly at Kaminario and Jeff Denworth, formerly at CTERA Networks.[7][3] Mike Wing of Dell is a part of the leadership team at VAST Data.[3]

VAST Data's launch was supported by Dell and Goldman Sachs.[8][9][10]

As of April 2020, the company has 145 employees.[7] During the COVID-19 pandemic, most employees are working from home.[11][12]

Technology

VAST Data uses Intel's Optane (or 3D Xpoint-based) NVMe SSDs.[4][13][5] 3D XPoint non-volatile memory is integrated into VAST Data's architecture, as hardware mechanism to handle computational storage software tasks such as erasure coding, large stripe write shaping, and other software mechanics, so that lower cost, high density NAND Flash-based SSDs can be effectively used behind the 3D XPoint high performance SSDs.[14]

VAST Data's technology allows for collapsing multiple storage tiers into one that has decoupled compute nodes, which are accessed using NVMe-oF.[1] After data reduction occurs, around 2PB of space is available.[1] The single VAST Data tier uses wide data stripes, with the purpose of global erasure coding.[1] NVMe-linked Databoxes contain flash drives for data and Optane XPoint for metadata.[1] VAST storage enclosures are connected to servers through NVMe-oF, using either 100Gb/s Ethernet or Infiniband.[15]

VAST Data, with regard to universal storage, uses Flash-QLC and 100 percent persistent global namespace.[16] It supports artificial intelligence applications along with more classical applications such as Web Content or Search.[17]

Its Year 2020 storage architecture release, known as LightSpeed, combines three core elements to deliver parallel and higher scalable performance for AI and HPC. These elements are:

  1. RDMA for NFS version 3.
  2. nconnect to create multiple network paths to a single NFS mount.
  3. NVidia GPUDirect available for NVIDIA GPU[18][19] [20]

References
  1. Mellor, Chris (February 26, 2019). "VAST Data: The first thing we do, let's kill all the hard drives". Blocks and Files.
  2. Miller, Ron (April 16, 2020). "TechCrunch".
  3. Mellor, Chris (February 26, 2019). "VAST Data's business sitrep". Blocks and Files.
  4. Coughlin, Tom (March 1, 2019). "VAST Storage Dreams". Forbes.
  5. Adshead, Antony. "QLC + 3D Xpoint = Vast Data's universal storage". Computer Weekly.
  6. Williams, Joe (April 17, 2020). "Business Insider".
  7. Wilson, Alexandra (April 16, 2020). "VAST Data Gets $1.2 Billion Valuation, As Researchers Race To Combat COVID-19". Forbes.
  8. Sawaya, Sydney (April 16, 2020). "Vast Data Grows War Chest". SDxCentral.
  9. Deutscher, Maria (April 16, 2020). "SiliconANGLE".
  10. Deutscher, Maria (September 12, 2019). "With upgraded storage platform, Dell-backed Vast Data targets AI workloads". SiliconANGLE.
  11. Kovar, Joseph F. (April 16, 2020). "Renen Hallak Talks Future". CRN.
  12. Costa, Cameron (May 5, 2020). "CNBC".
  13. Marko, Kurt (September 25, 2019). "NVMe-oF products are changing the face of data storage". TechTarget.
  14. "Vast Data Adds Zero Data Loss Guarantee for Storage". Channel Futures. June 7, 2019.
  15. Harris, Robin (July 27, 2020). "Vast Data: A smart new architecture for cloud scale storage". ZDNet.
  16. "Vast Data". February 27, 2019.
  17. Evans, Chris (November 13, 2019). "Leading storage for AI tools address workload capacity, performance". SearchStorage.
  18. Kovar, Joseph F. (September 15, 2020). "Vast Data Aims At Artificial Intelligence With LightSpeed Architecture". CRN.
  19. Coughlin, Tom (September 23, 2020). "Cloud At The Edge, GPU Storage And LTO Gen 9". Forbes.
  20. Denworth, Jeff (December 14, 2020). "LightSpeed Universal Storage for A.I. Webinar — VAST Data". YouTube.
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