The News: VAST Data announced its VAST Data Platform, which is designed to accelerate deep learning AI. The announcement of the VAST Data Platform can be viewed on the VAST Data website.
VAST Data Announces the VAST Data Platform
Analyst Take: The announcement by VAST Data on its Build Beyond online event represents a significant strategic shift for the company. VAST has been very successful with the VAST Universal Storage system with 10 exabytes of data stored for customers on six continents and a stellar customer list. Now, with the announcement of VAST Data Platform, the company is moving beyond providing a high performance, scaling storage solution to managing and optimizing data access for deep learning AI. The usage is not limited to AI specifically; other analytics and business intelligence (BI) applications are supported with the VAST design.
The VAST Universal Storage system was designed as a high-speed storage system for AI data with standard access protocols. Customers expanded the usage for all types of data, resulting in the wide scale of customers and data types. VAST Universal Storage stores and manages unstructured data, both files and objects, with a persistent tier of solid-state storage as a Write Buffer coupled with less expensive (QLC) flash storage and a large set of additional functions such as encryption, data reduction, and replication.
The VAST Data Platform builds on the storage system design, utilizing the internal database, Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture, intelligence engine with operations performed on data, global dataspace, and functions that are unique in their implementation. The result is a Data Platform to manage structured data (in the database) and unstructured data (stored on the VAST data storage system as elements) with advanced Data Platform capabilities such as a Data Catalog to enable features such as data lineage, data governance, search, discovery, etc. VAST has a long list of capabilities that cover the spectrum available in a Data Platform.
Beyond the functionality of the Data Platform that competes with vendors such as Databricks and Snowflake, VAST has recognized the opportunity that exists with AI maturing and moving into the enterprise and research institutions. While VAST Data Platform will operate in a public cloud (Azure, AWS, Google), opportunities for deployments in private clouds and the edge will come from a major expansion of AI. The key to these deployments, as VAST and their guest speaker from NVIDIA brought out, is the amount of data that will be needed to continue to feed existing and new AI models. The massive amount of data (sometimes referred to as private data) make it also impractical to move due to the transfer time and costs, so the design of VAST and NVIDIA is to move the AI processing to the data. From VAST’s standpoint, this processing involves running applications (deep learning included) on VAST nodes with the data management and optimizations controlled by the Data Platform. The execution parallelism, control of resources, and performance acceleration are part of the Data Platform capabilities.
VAST’s evolution from a storage system supplier to a Data Platform for AI is significant. This shift is not really a change but an additional product offering, leveraging the existing system design. The customer discussions will be with a different set of people for a Data Platform. There may be commonality with current customers but this will be different in usage.
Data Platforms will be a huge opportunity as AI/ML and the desire for consolidation of data for different purposes drives changes in the way data is handled. VAST Data has focused on simplicity but with an all-encompassing set of capabilities for Data Platform. This will position VAST Data very differently within the market landscape.
It will take some time for the VAST Data Platform to mature and be fully understood by potential customers. We think that the latest developments will raise the bar for current data platform companies and drive them to consider incorporating high performance storage in their offerings, which now rely primarily on cloud object storage. VAST has raised the stakes for data platforms.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Randy draws from over 35 years of experience in helping storage companies design and develop products. As a partner at Evaluator Group and now The Futurum Group, he spends much of his time advising IT end-user clients on architectures and acquisitions.
Previously, Randy was Vice President of Storage and Planning at Sun Microsystems. He also developed disk and tape systems for the mainframe attachment at IBM, StorageTek, and two startup companies. Randy also designed disk systems at Fujitsu and Tandem Computers.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Randy served as the CTO for ProStor, where he brought products to market addressing a long-term archive for Information Technology and the Healthcare and Media/Entertainment markets.
He has also written numerous industry articles and papers as an educator and presenter, and he is the author of two books: Planning a Storage Strategy and Information Archiving – Economics and Compliance. The latter is the first book of its kind to explore information archiving in depth. Randy regularly teaches classes on Information Management technologies in the U.S. and Europe.
