VAST Data’s Latest Universal Storage Release Lays the Foundation for Building Next Generation Data Centers

VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI-powered world, is enhancing its Universal Storage software platform, raising the bar for secure, sustainable hyperscale data infrastructure.

Built upon its disaggregated and shared-everything (DASE) architecture, the new feature updates (versions 4.4 and 4.5) in Universal Storage enable VAST to power a zero-trust approach to data protection.

New and notable security features include:

• Cloud-scale IPv6 networking: Built from the ground up with security in mind, VAST’s support for IPv6 provides the data integrity, authentication and address scale required by governments and forward-looking organizations building next-generation, cloud-scale data centers.
• Advanced protocol auditing: Universal Storage can now record actions of administrators and storage users. This allows IT admins to export the data to security information and event management (SIEM), or an analytics engine for forensics and threat detection, to find events such as ransomware or rogue insider threats.
• Near-infinite snapshots: Universal Storage has dramatically scaled up the number of snapshots supported in a system to meet the needs of any scale application. Customers can now create 100s of thousands of snapshots in the system without any of the volume-based limits of legacy solutions and at any directory depth..The Universal Storage snapshots provide an additional layer of data protection and disaster recovery to better safeguard customers from user error to sophisticated cybercriminal activity such as ransomware attacks.
• High-performance in-flight data encryption: VAST now implements NFSv4 Kerberos protocol encryption (krb5p) – but without the performance penalty suffered by other storage vendors for lower latency and better throughput.

Because enterprise data centers are some of the world’s largest energy consumers, VAST is continuing to develop solutions to help customers reduce their energy footprint for storage and compute in support of environmentally sustainable business practices.

To further VAST’s sustainability mission, the new Universal Storage releases also feature these improvements:

• Support for low-power NVMe enclosures (Ceres): 4.4 features the general availability of the previously-announced Ceres NVMe enclosure designed and sold by VAST’s hardware partners. Ceres doubles the performance capabilities of Universal Storage while consuming 50% less power and space. Ceres implements industry-leading hardware such as NVIDIA Bluefield DPUs and low-power ARM processors to make it possible to build highly-available flash storage enclosures without the need for power-hungry x86 processors.
• Data-aware compression: VAST builds on its revolutionary Similarity-based data reduction capabilities by dynamically selecting the best encoding method per data type for increased data reduction. On average, this advanced data reduction technique saves customers an additional 30% of storage capacity to save energy, reduce physical storage costs and decrease data center footprint.

“VAST continues to rapidly close the security, performance and cost gaps facing enterprise infrastructure with a maniacal focus on new feature releases that make VAST universal for every customer’s needs,” said Jeff Denworth, co-founder and CMO at VAST Data. “A universal data platform that enables zero-trust and slashes data centers’ carbon footprints is critical in an era of cloud and web scale, and VAST is rising to the challenge of tomorrow’s infrastructure leaders.”