Storage mad lads VAST Data tell world+dog: We've just inhaled $80m. Oh, and here's how we do that 'no more tiers' thing

Startup VAST Data lifted the lid on its secret storage sauce today, revealing cheap, exabyte-level scale out flash arrays sped by Optane SSDs – which it hopes will persuade users to load up their on-premises spinning rust in the 'barrow and wheel it to the tip. thunderclouds gather ... tornado on street Everyone's all like ' …

[muhfugen]

A high performance flash array whos primary method of access is NFS and it doesnt support 4.1 and multipathing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Block or file, make up your mind

Multipathing is a block device feature, while NFS is a Network shared file protocol, and doesn't have the terminology of multipathing, but rather fault tolerance and High availability, so make up your mind what you mean...

Its a NAS, not a SAN, so multipathing is irrelevant..

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: Block or file, make up your mind

Sounds like someone has never heard of pNFS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Block or file, make up your mind

Did they say they support pNFS ? No.

Who uses pNFS in 2019 ?

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

A VAST PITA

"VAST's appeal centres on its claim that it can replace virtually all existing layers of primary, secondary and tertiary storage with a single online tier of storage."

... as long as your compute layer is only accessing storage via NFSv3 or S3. This sounds an awful lot like a knock-off of what Pure is doing with FlashBlade. I'm guessing Dell EMC told these guys to go out and build a FlashBlade killer (hence the investment from Dell), and the company, if successful, will get bought back into the Dull Evil Machine Corporation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Get burned?

Yay, another storage company.

[Anonymous Coward]

March 2016: Pure Storage announces FlashBlade; Feb 2016: EMC invests seed in Vast Data

I see what you did there...

[coeur_de_lion]

New Kidz on the block?

Looking at the claims made for this system, it does look as though it addresses many issues for users, including scale and efficiency. If I am right it looks as though it is also "software defined", which ticks a lot of boxes too.

I suppose it is going to be difficult in the future to launch a new company that shifts "boxes", of storage to customers.

[Terry P]

I still think the storage market is tough and crowded and you really do need something very different to survive. Even then you have about 2 years before a large competitor brings out a similar technology.

[flyguy959]

$/GB is key

This sounds to me most like Kaminario k2.n with the addition of pmem and QLC in a denser box. I can see the similarities to Flashblade except this is entirely disaggregated and each flasblade node is basicallly an HCI node with compute and storage and it can only scale to 75 nodes vs 1000.

But THE MOST IMPORTANT thing imo is that they can do alllll of this for the same $/GB as spinning rust with how they handle the QLC. If so, HPC, big data, even backups have no reason not to use this.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that block access is coming. Either in new types of c-nodes or the same container.