The VAST Data Datastore is a groundbreaking scale-out data storage solution that eliminates complex storage tiering and brings an end to the HDD era in the data center.
Vast has engineered the first new distributed system architecture in 20 years - Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) - that enables embarrassingly parallel processing on affordable flash at exabyte-scale and at the cost of an HDD archive.
DASE is a radical departure from the Shared Nothing Architecture, invented by Google in 2003.
The DASE architecture, combined with software innovations from VAST, eliminates the tradeoffs and compromises between price and performance and scale that have existed with storage platforms for decades.
Declared “the storage architecture of the future” by IDC in 2020, DASE lays the foundation for game-changing levels of scale, efficiency, resiliency and QoS such that it’s finally possible— and affordable— for companies to consolidate all of their data and all of their applications onto one single and universal tier of flash infrastructure.
The Disaggregated Shared Everything Architecture
STARTING FROM A NEW FOUNDATION
VAST Data leverages new hardware technologies as the basis for the Shared Everything Architecture.
NVMe-Over-Fabrics
A Data-center-scale storage protocol that enables remote NVMe devices to be accessed with direct attached performance.
Hyperscale Flash
A new flash architecture that costs dramatically less than enterprise flash while delivering enterprise levels of performance.
Storage Class Memory
Persistent, NVMe memory that can be used to reliably buffer writes to hyperscale flash and create large, global metadata structures to enable added efficiency.
VAST SOFTWARE INNOVATIONS
Distributed Persistent and Integrated Metadata
Non-volatile, cluster-wide metadata management for superior resilience, scalability, performance and insight.
Obtain insight in real-time into directories and buckets by enabling fine-grained queries at any scale. VAST has eliminated the need to perform time-consuming operations that walk file systems.
Exabyte Scale Namespace
Independently scale performance and capacity in a single massive namespace – and across geo-distributed data centers and cloud providers.
A decentralized approach to distributed locking at the Element level (file, object, table) makes it possible to transact with performance and strict atomic consistency, from the core to the edge to the cloud.
High-Performance Multi-Protocol Client Access (NFS V3, V4, SMB 2.1, 3, S3, K8S CSI)
Eliminate islands of data infrastructure with a single platform that delivers integrated data management. All protocols share equal data access and enjoy equal performance access via VAST’s namespace abstraction called the Element Store.
In addition, VAST takes the classic NAS experience and “turns it up to 11” with support for RDMA, multi-pathing and Nvidia’s GPUDirect Storage APIs.
The VAST DataStore embraces open, standard protocols and marries them with highperformance optimizations to eliminate the need for complex client-side storage drivers like parallel file systems or SAN clients.
Simple & Scalable Snapshots
We’ve pioneered new data structures that make it possible to easily snapshot data even at exabyte scale. VAST Snapshots never require data copies, so performance is never impacted. Easily take and replicate 100,000s of snaps at any system depth.
Flexible Quality-of-Service
The DataStore features multiple levels of QOS to enable scalable service delivery and infrastructure consolidation. Logical and HW-based QOS tools make it possible to either govern or isolate I/O flows from noisy neighbors or whole compute clusters.
Eliminate Refreshes & Migrations
VAST’s asymmetric cluster architecture can combine multiple generations of flash and CPU hardware into a single cluster without exposing tiering complexity to users. This approach eliminates hardware refresh cycles and painful data migrations.
Redefining Flash Economics
DASE efficiency algorithms bring the cost of flash to HDD price points. Similarity data reduction delivers world-leading data reduction. New Erasure Codes minimize the overhead of failure protection. New QLC flash management extends the life of low-cost QLC flash for a decade, guaranteed.
Once your archive is built from flash, you no longer need additional tiers of infrastructure above it. No more hard drives. No more tiers. Storage is now just universal and… simple.
A Breakthrough in Unstructured Data Reduction
Similarity data reduction is VAST’s revolutionary approach to global data compression, offering a unique combination of data reduction and fine-grained pattern matching.
Similarity goes beyond traditional methods by uncovering correlations in data that others miss to deliver the world’s first exabyte-scale reference compression system.
PDF - VAST Data Radically Transforms the Flash Economic Equation
By applying new thinking to how storage can be designed, scaled and how data can be efficiently managed, VAST Data has built an architecture with the principal focus of breaking the long standing trade-off that has existed between performance and capacity.
VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything architecture (DASE) is a purpose built storage cluster architecture designed to scale to petabytes, give tier-1 allflash performance, and sells for a price point equivalent to what customers pay for archive storage.
By breaking the long-standing price/performance trade-off in storage, VAST has built a system architecture that’s fast enough, scalable enough and affordable enough for all data and all applications.
PDF -VAST Data Universal Storage – Innovation to Break Decades of Tradeoffs
A new storage architecture concept made possible by a collection of new hardware technologies has enabled VAST to break decades of long-standing storage compromises.
From AI to backup, from HPC to Cloud... never before has it been practical to consolidate a such a diverse set of applications on a single storage platform in a way where nothing is compromised on – performance, capacity, resilience, cost – get the best of all worlds for data intensive applications.
When it’s possible to store all of your data in a single tier of storage that’s fast enough for all of your demanding applications, large enough to manage all of your data, and affordable enough such that the economic arguments for HDDs no longer apply, everything is simple.
The VAST DataStore breaks all the tradeoffs of solutions based on the Shared Nothing architecture
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Scales to the exabytes of data while still delivering the sub to single digit millisecond latency and five 9s reliability users expect from an all-flash array.
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Supports parallel I/O from thousands of clients and deliver the strict atomic consistency to support transactional applications.
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An All Flash datastore at a price customers can afford when buying petabytes at a time.
The VAST DataStore Explained
The unstructured data foundation of the VAST Data Platform, the VAST DataStore breaks the tradeoff between performance and capacity.
A scalable multi-protocol storage architecture for your unstructured data that meets the needs of the most powerful computing architectures, while delivering archive economics.
The VAST DataStore’s DASE Architecture Explained
The ground-breaking foundation of the VAST Data Platform, the Disaggregated, SharedEverything Architecture (DASE) empowers the most demanding workloads by providing performance, capacity, scale, resilience, and simplicity at archive economics.
Why Does DASE™ Architecture Matter?
VAST’s DASE architecture is the key to the economics, simplicity, scalability, and resilience enjoyed by customers of VAST’s Universal Storage.
In this video VAST’s CMO and Co-Founder, Jeff Denworth, explains why VAST’s DASE architecture is key to enabling a truly all-flash data center and how IT professionals across industries and use cases can benefit from it.
PDF - VAST Universal Storage for Containers
When they first became popular, containers were used mostly for stateless operations such as web servers like Nginix. As container frameworks and orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes, become a bigger part of the modern application agenda, organizations have expanded their use to also power databases and other stateful applications.
Customers have a variety of choices when building persistent volumes to power their stateful applications, but none combine the simplicity, speed and breakthrough flash economics that VAST Data’s Universal Storage provides.
PDF - The VAST Data Platform White Paper
This comprehensive White Paper describes The VAST Data Platform in detail.
Pages 26 through 68 describes the VAST DataStore in depth.
The VAST Data Platform is a breakthrough approach to data-intensive computing that serves as the comprehensive software infrastructure required to capture, catalog, refine, enrich, and preserve data through real-time deep data analysis and deep learning.
It is designed to provide seamless and universal data access and computing from edge-to-cloud, all from a platform that is designed for enterprises and cloud service providers to deploy on the infrastructure of their choosing.
