VAST Data, a New York-based company that announced a new storage architecture built to address decades of tradeoffs to eliminate infrastructure complexity and application bottlenecks, has exited stealth mode and raised $80 million in funding. The $80 million raise was in two rounds from Norwest Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, 83 North, Goldman Sachs and a TPG Growth-sponsored investment platform.
Plus VAST developed an exabyte-scale Universal Storage system built from high-performance flash media and it features several breakthrough innovations that result in a total cost of acquisition that is equivalent to hard drive based archive systems.
Now enterprises can consolidate applications onto a single tier of storage that meets the performance needs of the most demanding workloads and it is scalable enough to manage all of a customer’s data. Plus it is affordable enough so that it eliminates the need for storage tiering and archiving.
VAST Data is known for inventing a new type of storage architecture from the ground up to exploit technologies like NVMe over fabrics, Storage Class Memory (SCM) and low-cost QLC flash. The result was an exabyte-scale, all-NVMe flash, disaggregated shared-everything (DASE) architecture that breaks from the idea that scalable storage needs have to be built from the notion that breaks from the idea that scalable storage needs to be built as shared-nothing clusters. And this architecture enables global algorithms that deliver superior levels of storage efficiency and system resilience.
Some of the biggest breakthroughs of VAST’s Universal Storage platform include exabyte-scale / 100% persistent global namespace, global QLC flash translation, global data protection, similarity-based data reduction VAST DATA also offers a 10-year endurance warranty so customers can deploy QLC flash with peace of mind.
“Storage has always been complicated. Organizations for decades have been dealing with a complex pyramid of technologies that force some tradeoff between performance and capacity,” said VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak. “VAST Data was founded to break this and many other long-standing tradeoffs. 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.”
Austin Che, the founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, said that his company designs custom microbes for a wide variety of industries using automated biological foundry and VAST Data is “making storage easy.” General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) SVP and CTO Yogesh Khanna said that his team’s work with VAST Data provides an opportunity for their customers to utilize the vision of an all-flash data center with deep analytics for large sets of data and his company is already delivering multi-petabyte VAST Universal Storage systems. And Zebra Medical Vision CTO Eyal Toledano pointed out that VAST provides a solution to all of his company’s artificial intelligence storage challenges by delivering performance that is superior to what is possible with traditional NAS while providing a simple and scalable appliance that requires no effort to deploy and manage.
