New York – April 6, 2021 – VAST Data, the storage software company breaking decades-old tradeoffs, today unveiled Gemini, the enterprise storage appliance model reinvented for the age of hyperscale. This offering, which disaggregates the business of hardware and software, allows VAST to sell managed software on hardware that customers can buy at cost as integrated appliances that ship directly from the manufacturer. With Gemini, VAST has solved many of the greatest hurdles associated with pure software and pure appliance models enabling customers to buy like hyperscale cloud operators without the heavy lifting commonly associated with building always-on, massively scalable clouds of low-cost flash infrastructure.

This new offering provides customers all of the benefits of a software-defined business model in terms of flexibility and cost advantage, but at the same time preserves the simple and multigenerational cluster appliance model that customers have come to love from VAST Data. This event marks the company’s complete transition into a software business and is intended to align VAST’s business objectives precisely with the needs and objectives of its customers.

Gemini is a multi-faceted commercial offering that builds on VAST’s Universal Storage concept which industry analyst firm IDC has declared as “the storage architecture of the future.”  Features include:

• The Disaggregated Commercial Model – Without being constrained by the considerations of running a hardware business, Gemini provides customers with complete hardware cost transparency, lets customers make investments on their own capacity and time horizon, and provides them with the freedom to dial up their system performance by buying hardware at cost to meet the demands of any intense workload.

• The Infinite Storage Lifecycle – Just as with modern cloud infrastructure that is never taken offline for upgrades or migrations, the asymmetric architecture of Universal Storage supports the ability to extend Gemini subscriptions across multiple generations of hardware that compose, over time, into an exabyte-scale storage cluster where data is never bound to hardware generations and customers never again need to migrate data from system to system.

• The VAST Co-Pilot – With Gemini, VAST is making the investment in a Level 3 engineer that is paired with each new customer. Co-Pilots are constantly monitoring your systems, prioritizing your feature requests, and handling all of the planning and deploying as you expand Universal Storage. Co-Pilots are expert cloud operators who work for you to handle all aspects of system management, planning, expansion, and day-to-day operation.

• VAST Data’s Zero Compromises Guarantee – VAST continues its commitment to 10-year protection of low-cost flash, its commitment to uptime and data durability, its commitment to data reduction supremacy, and its commitment to provide all Universal Storage features as part of Gemini, while also offering an unconditional 60-day right to return. The Zero Compromises Guarantee removes the risk of adopting a new system architecture and is the ideal complement to Gemini as customers move away from legacy HDD-based architectures.

VAST has already delivered dozens of petabytes to customers since the launch of this new business model at the turn of the year. Gemini customers such as Squarepoint Capital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard benefit from the flexibility Gemini provides them as they scale their Universal Storage investments with a solution that is now optimized for each organization’s unique requirements.

With Gemini, organizations can benefit from:

• Financial Freedom: Customers can do more with less, realizing up to 90% lower total cost of ownership over a 10 year period as they continue to grow and refresh their hardware.

• Freedom of Choice: Gemini offers the freedom to expand performance and capacity independently and licenses capacity according to a customer’s specific needs.

• Freedom from Complexity: Universal Storage, managed by a Co-Pilot and expandable through multiple generations of hardware, delivers freedom from refresh-driven downtime, migration headaches, cutovers, and unneeded maintenance that is common with legacy, symmetric architectures.

“After deploying hundreds of petabytes of storage around the world, we’ve learned so much about what our customers want and need,” said Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data. “The promise of disaggregation shouldn’t just be about the technology, but equally about how that technology is deployed. Instead of purchasing hardware and software together and being caught up in an endless refresh cycle as we’ve seen for the past 30 years, Gemini offers the freedom, flexibility, and simplicity, all at an affordable cost, that organizations need to deploy an infinite storage lifecycle.”

Supporting Quotes

Hardware refreshes are a chronic headache for any IT department as any downtime can have a negative impact on business operations,” said Bill Mayo, CIO of Broad Institute. “What we look for are solutions that have the flexibility to scale performance and capacity so we can quickly adjust to the needs of our organization.

In the quantitative trading industry, having the flexibility to dial up performance and grow on demand without a forced refresh or hardware tax is a key win for our business,” said Jesse Sieger, Systems Specialist at global investment management firm, Squarepoint Capital. “Gemini has given us the freedom and flexibility to meet our data center needs at any given time, while also increasing our return on investment.

Since its inception, VAST’s mission has centered around breaking longstanding storage tradeoffs,” said Eric Kaplan, CTO of AHEAD. “With Gemini, enterprises no longer have to purchase software and hardware at the same time which makes it dramatically simpler to scale their storage deployments.

Gemini offers the market an affordable solution to solving what has traditionally been a complex and costly problem of forced refresh cycles between software and hardware,” said Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “VAST’s new deployment model underscores the value and opportunity the industry now has to rethink the relationship between hardware and software and frees organizations from these longstanding constraints.

When VAST Data introduced the concept of Universal Storage just over two years ago, they vowed to remove the longstanding storage tradeoffs that have plagued the industry for decades,” said Michael Parks, President and COO of Flywheel Data. “With the development of Gemini, VAST continues to address this fundamental idea, providing our customers the flexibility to manage their software and hardware based on current demands.

Upcoming Events

For more information on Gemini, join VAST, industry leaders from the Broad Institute, Squarepoint Capital, AHEAD, and Scott Sinclair of the Enterprise Strategy Group on April 6 at 1 pm ET on LinkedIn as they discuss the trends that have shaped the data storage industry and what is next for data architects. More information on the session, “The Storage Experience: Redefined For The Age Of Hyperscale,” and how to watch can be found here.