Vast Data updated its Universal Storage architecture that includes  20 new features, including support for Windows and MacOS applications, and cloud data replication and native encryption. The release also comes two weeks after Vast Data nearly tripled its valuation to $1.2 billion in a $100 million Series C funding round.

The new platform release is targeted at a range of mission critical workloads. Vast Data said it can enable users to access files across any Linux, Windows, and Mac environment and support health care organizations is securely storing and protecting patient data with encryption and replication.  

Jeff Denworth, co-founder and VP of products and marketing at Vast, told SDxCentral that the data storage market has reached a tipping point and that simplified storage is the way forward. He explained that for the past 30 years, organizations have been challenged with balancing the performance needs of their applications with ever-growing amounts of data. This has forced organizations to choose between a storage system that is designed to optimize for either performance or capacity.

Denworth cited this struggle as the basis for the classic tiered storage architecture that was first popularized in the ‘90s, “where storage classes were created and customers needed to move data between hot, warm, and cold tiers." This model siloed information, which Denworth said makes it difficult for customers to manage their data.

“Fast forward 30 years later, and the problems created by this storage tiering concept have only become more acute under the weight of the modern computing agenda,” Denworth said. “The world has changed from the early days of human-driven computing toward machine intelligence, where new big data and [artificial intelligence] applications only get more accurate and intelligent as they become exposed to larger and larger data sets.” 

The new generation of applications, Denworth explained, require instant, random access to vast reserves of information in order to provide organizations with real-time insights. “Data is the new oil and if now the most value is found in the largest data stores, the modern application agenda is rendering the classic tiered approach to data storage obsolete,” he added.

With Vast 3.0, the company is looking to entice customers of the legacy "shared-nothing" scale-out, storage systems with a disaggregated, shared-everything (DASE) model. 

Denworth explained that in a shared-nothing cluster, storage media such as solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) are local to each storage node and additional nodes can be used to scale-out storage capacity and performance; however, this approach presents challenges specifically in the realm of common node failures. When a node fails, which could look like anything from a software crash or hardware failure, the data on that node is then unavailable. To avoid losing that data the system must then be rebuilt around the failure or risk data loss until the node is back up and synchronized with the changes that happened while it was down.

“When data is written to a node it must send messages to the other nodes in order to coordinate this write to the data to their local media," Denworth said. "Therefore, as clusters grow in size they do not scale proportionally in terms of performance because the amount of internal cluster cross-talk (chatter) increases with size.”

Under the DASE model, storage media is available on non-volatile memory express (NVMe) enclosures that “have no single point of failure. With DASE, media is shared globally and is never exclusively controlled by any one node,” he said.

A DASE cluster runs in stateless Linux containers on top of x86 servers that remain vacant. In the event of a server node failure or update, the other Vast servers can pick up the load because the remaining servers have immediate and global access to all the data. Unlike a legacy scale-out node failure, a rebuild is not required since the remaining servers have immediate and global access to all the data, eliminating the risk of data loss.

Vast Data claims it can render the disk drive obsolete in the data center. The result is a disaggregated, data-shared everywhere platform that the vendor believes will close the door to shared-nothing storage architectures. 

“This new DASE concept lays the foundation for storage systems to manage data and manage infrastructure globally,” Denworth said. It is his belief that Vast 3.0 is breaking “30 years of performance and capacity tradeoffs” that will open new doors – and wallets –  for the DASE concept to spread broadly across the enterprise market.