It’s the most wonderful time of the year and one of the best ways to kick off the holiday season - AWS’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas! Here at VAST we’re thrilled to be sponsoring this conference for the first time, and eager to show off the VAST Data Platform running on AWS cloud services.
Rethinking everything in data
At VAST Data, we like to say “what if?” a lot. What if we didn’t have to sacrifice performance for cost? What if we could easily scale up and scale down our storage? What if we didn’t have to silo our AI and BI data stacks? What if we could start over again, what would we do differently?
After years of innovation, the VAST Data Platform answers these questions. Built upon a next generation, all flash architecture, VAST breaks the fundamental tradeoffs inherent in other systems: you no longer have to choose between cost efficiency, performance, and scalability. VAST allows you to minimize cost with our intelligent low-level optimization of flash storage, while delivering best-in-class performance at exabyte scale. Gone are the days where your BI data stack can only access “hot” data; to truly harness the business value of all of your organization’s data, tiered data won't cut it. The data needs to be all in one place and immediately accessible, so there's no recall time or transfer across environments needed.
The VAST Data Platform offers a single architecture for all of your organization’s data - structured and unstructured. Structured data can be stored in the all-flash VAST DataBase in a familiar tabular format, breaking the tradeoffs between columnar and row-based database systems. The VAST DataBase is flexible and accelerates queries, providing groundbreaking performance and data accessibility while interfacing with the data stack tools you know and love. What’s more, for organizations working on deep learning, by storing unstructured data in the VAST DataStore and structured data in the VAST DataBase, you get the best of both worlds: data serving both AI and BI in the same technology stack. This is truly the future of data architecture.
VAST on Cloud
The world of VAST Data was originally focused on data on-premises - you’d be right to wonder what we’re doing at AWS re:Invent! However, as with most things in technology the right answer for many organizations is a hybrid environment, leveraging both self-hosted and cloud-based infrastructure. Today, VAST runs in your own data center, in AWS via the Marketplace, or both. That duality of infrastructure is paramount in a modern data architecture, providing the scalability, resiliency, and cost savings of a data center with the flexibility of a cloud service provider.
File services in the cloud have grown a lot over the years but still lack the performance of systems on premises. Since data management at the largest scales is our area of expertise, we’ve been able to take the optimizations we’ve made for self-managed infrastructure and apply it to cloud storage services. This means the entire set of features you know and love from VAST are now available as cloud offerings.
In both cloud- and datacenter-based infrastructures you can leverage our DASE architecture, and access all your data using S3, NFS, or SMB; you’ll get similarity-based data reduction that drastically lowers costs associated with cloud storage resources. With VAST you can access any or all your on-prem data directly in AWS to support burst-to-cloud use cases, dramatically simplifying hybrid cloud environments. The cloud availability of VAST also allows for a cloud-based backup solution, providing yet another check to our data protection and resiliency focus.
Consider this a teaser 😉 We’ll have a lot more to say soon about new VAST hybrid cloud and enterprise data management enhancements, so stay tuned!
VAST in AWS
Getting started with VAST in AWS is easy. Simply search for VAST in the AWS Marketplace, and subscribe to access our CloudFormation template. Via our BYOL model, you can use your existing VAST license or contact us to get more information on VAST licensing.
The deployment template walks you through the configuration and initialization of a VAST on Cloud (VoC) in an existing VPC, along with peripheral configuration such as needed firewall ports, SSH keypairs, and AMI account settings.
Once the CFT completes and VAST is up and running, setting up functionality such as using AWS as a replication peer for an on-premises VAST cluster is straightforward in the VAST Web UI:
Visit us at AWS re:Invent
Come visit us at Booth #1504 in the AWS re:Invent Data Zone! You can also pre-book a meeting with us here. There will be a great crew of VASTronauts who will be happy to show you a demo of our platform running in AWS and hybrid environments. We’d love to hear more about the data challenges and opportunities you’re experiencing and tell you more about the VAST Data Platform and its cloud functionality.
