A VAST-ly Different Storage Story

VAST Data made their first big public splash since coming out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. At they event, they showed off their “disaggregated share everything architecture” meant to offer hyperscaler agility and scalability without the cost and data gravity of the public cloud. For Becky Elliott, their message of reducing complexity while allowing for scale really resonated.


Voices in Data Storage – Episode 11: A Conversation With Renen Hallak

This episode of Voices in Data Storage features an interview with VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak. Host Enrico Signoretti saw VAST Data during their Storage Field Day presentation last month, and was impressed by what he saw. The company set out to “redo” storage, offering Tier 1 performance without the accompanying price tag. They discuss how emerging technologies like QLC flash and storage class memory are at the core of their new architecture.


VAST Data – No More Tiers Means No More Tears?

Dan Frith is shedding no tears for tiers after seeing VAST Data come out of stealth at Storage Field Day last month. Leveraging a greenfield architecture built around NVMe over fabric and Storage Class Memory, they claim to offer Tier 1 performance at scale without the actual cost of Tier 1 storage. Dan was definitely impressed by the ambition of their approach, and thinks their disaggregated share-everything approach to storage is impressive.


#91 – Storage Field Day 18 in Review

In this episode of the Storage Unpacked podcast, Chris Evans and Martin Glassborow discuss what happened at Storage Field Day last month. The companies pretty cleanly divided between scale-out primary storage and data protection solutions. They touch on all the presenters, and where listeners can learn more about the event. Be sure to give it a listen as a preview before watching all of the event presentation video on our site.


VAST Data Launches With New Scale-Out Storage Platform

As one of the delegates at Storage Field Day, Chris Evans got to see VAST Data come out of stealth at the event. The company offers a new storage platform built on a disaggregated shared-everything architecture. Using a combination of QLC NAND flash and storage-class memory in an enclosure, linked across an NVMe fabric, any storage controller can talk to any NVMe device on the fabric. The result is a scalable architecture with no inherent pinch points, that could scale to thousands of storage nodes and tens of thousands of controllers.


Faster and Bigger SSDs Enable Us to Talk About Something Else Than IOps

For Jon Klaus, one of the major themes at Storage Field Day this week was the state of NVMe in the enterprise. Some companies like VAST Data were bullish enough to declare the death of the spinning disk, while other presenters like Western Digital were more optimistic about the long term viability of older media alongside NVMe. For Jon, what was significant was moving beyond just a speed and feed conversation around NVMe. Instead presenters focused on why geography of data and latency matters more across the entire IT stack.


#SFD18 Introduces Us to VAST Data

Matt Leib digs into the public launch of VAST Data, which happened during their Storage Field Day presentation last month. The developed their Universal File System based on the belief that all data across storage tiers can be handled by their single architectural environment. Part of this is done by aggressively using Intel Optane as a write cache for metadata, complimented by JBOF NVMe connected by ethernet or Infiniband to server environments. By disaggregating storage from compute, the company also adds scale beyond the rack to the equation as well. For Matt, it was an impressive debut.


VAST Data Must Be Something Special

It’s always a unique experience when a company comes out of stealth at a Field Day event. At Storage Field Day last month, the delegates, including Chin-Fah Heoh, got to be part of the public unveiling for Vast Data. Aside from having a very amiable tech evangelist, Chin-Fah was impressed by their unique architecture, which uses stateless compute nodes running the Vast Universal File System in containers, which connect to Databoxes that store metadata via Intel Optane. Their data reduction was just as impressive, and left Chin-Fah with a very positive impression about this emerging company.


Podcast #3 – Chris & Matt Review the SFD18 Presenters

In this podcast episode, Chris Evan and Matt Leib did an off the cuff rundown of the Storage Field Day presenters. The event was jam packed with interesting IT companies, and the two do a great job of running through what stood out from Cohesity, Datera, IBM, NetApp, StorPool, VAST Data WekaIO and Western Digital.