The universal All-Flash storage solution
The complexity of data centers
The world of data storage from an operator's point of view can be very complex. Companies have to manage a multitude of systems and a lot of energy is lost in the process of moving data back and forth in the complicated storage hierarchy. The applications also suffer if the required data is limited to slow archive storage systems. Even the cloud services available today have barely revised their data storage hierarchy and data storage concepts. Rather, conventional concepts are repackaged here and offered as a service for customers. The result is service delivery with the same level of complexity that customers have dealt with for decades.
If you were to build an ideal data center, Flash would be the best choice as a storage medium. Until now, however, customers have never been able to afford a true All-Flash data center because the cost differences between hard drive and flash storage systems have been prohibitive. Although the hard drive offers an inexpensive way of storing data, it also brings with it constant challenges in terms of performance and capacity. Even though their capacity grows almost annually, the speed remains relatively constant, so essentially the performance per bit decreases as the drives get bigger and bigger.
Flash memory is an attempt to bridge this growing gap between hard drive performance and capacity. As the SSD capacity increases, so does the performance. On the other hand, however the many solution providers of Flash systems have not kept pace with the innovations in the Flash market and have forced customers to continue to compromise. The additional cost of enterprise Flash systems compared to HDD-based storage forced many customers to limit only their most valuable data to Flash.
The main question VAST asks itself: “what can be done to democratize flash storage infrastructure for all data?“
The universal storage solution from VAST Data
The goal of VAST is to break these 30-year-old compromises between price and performance. The first step towards eliminating the economic arguments in favor of mechanical media is to combine new hardware and network technologies with new and innovative storage algorithms.
The solution is a VAST Universal Storage, a single, scalable and affordable high-performance system for all data and applications. The first ALL-Flash unstructured data platform that offers Tier-1 performance, archive economy and the simplicity of a NAS.
What makes it different from other providers:
Global Flash Translation Layer
allows you to use the cheapest Flash on the market without sacrificing any performance or endurance.
Data security
by using only 2-3% of the resource capacity. Much more efficient enterprise backups and very fast restores.
Data reduction
with the best of both worlds: global approach of deduplication and fine granularity of compression.
- All-Flash Data Center: Unparalleled flash economy, competitive with HDD systems.
- Up to 1PB per RU: Practically a data center in a single rack.
- 10 Years of Longevity: More like a tape library than a hard drive storage system.
VAST's Universal Storage saves customers up to 90% compared to what they would pay for off-the-shelf flash technology. The system combines Exabyte scalability with multifunctional Quality-of-Service-Tools in order to enable the consolidation of all data and applications on a scalable flash level. Everything is easier when you no longer have to move data across infrastructure silos.
Optimized applications:
- Artificial Intelligence: RDMA acceleration for GPU servers is 4x faster than NAS and VAST eliminates HDD latency by making flash affordable for all training data.
- Content Creation : Workflows run faster when you combine the performance of all-flash NAS at the price point of archive storage.
- Content Delivery: CDNs and cable operators can now afford to eliminate service latency and serve exabytes of content from flash.
- Data Protection: Enterprise backups are more efficient, recoveries are faster, and data centers are compacted with VAST.
- HPC: The performance of a parallel file system with the simplicity of a modern NAS platform.
- Life Science: Accelerate classic and modern bioinformatics pipelines and consolidate storage silos.
- Quantitative Trading: Gain ultimate advantage when all research data can be analyzed at NVMe speeds.
The modern technology foundation
NVMe-OVER-FABRICS
With NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF), standard data center networks can be converted into scalable storage structures that combine the performance of NVMe DAS with the efficiency of a shared storage infrastructure.
QLC FLASH
QLC Flash is the latest generation of high density flash that enables the business goals of the VAST concept while delivering NVMe flash performance for the world's most demanding applications.
3D XPOINT
For the first time in 30 years, Intel introduced a new non-volatile storage medium, positioned between Flash and DRAM in the media hierarchy. 3D XPoint storage is the technology that enables QLC to be used in corporate environments.
The VAST cluster architecture
VAST's DASE storage architecture contradicts the rule that scalable storage must be built from clusters without sharing. The benefits of disconnecting servers from storage are as follows:
- Servers are stateless and failures of a server never require data reconstruction over a network.
- Servers are loosely coupled in a scalable cluster - each one works independently while all of them access a shared global namespace. This avoids the "crosstalk" of clusters and enables practically unlimited scalability.
- New global algorithms are being implemented to achieve breakthrough levels of efficiency and failure safety.
VAST SERVER
Clusters can be created with 2-10k independent servers. Servers can be combined for QOS, scaled if necessary and combined with applications to bring NVMe over Fabrics speed to the host.
NVME FABRIC
Redundant, independently scalable clusters can be created by connecting each server and device in the cluster via standard data center networks (Ethernet or IB), thus enabling the common concept of VAST.
NVMe Enclosure
Highly available NVMe enclosures manage up to 1PB per U. Enclosures can be scaled independently of servers and clusters can be created to manage exabytes of data in a multi-protocol namespace.