Press Release
Dec 17, 2021

VAST Data Plays the End Game with Enterprise Hard Drives

With Support for Massively Dense Flash and Intelligent Power Management, Universal Storage Now Delivers 10x Better Power Efficiency and 5x Better Data Center Space Efficiency at Cost Parity

VAST Data Plays the End Game with Enterprise Hard Drives
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NEW YORK – Dec 17, 2021 – VAST Data, the storage software company breaking decades-old tradeoffs, today announced that it has doubled the storage density of the hardware platforms supported by its Universal Storage offering, providing customers with an even more cost-effective and power-efficient all-flash data platform that is the vehicle to achieving cost and efficiency supremacy in enterprise and cloud data centers. Based on Intel’s 30 terabyte (TB) quad level cell (QLC) solid state drives (SSDs), VAST-supported NVMe enclosures double data center density to feature over a petabyte (PB) of effective capacity per rack unit (RU). VAST’s innovative approach to data management and industry leading Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture enables enterprise customers to deploy cutting-edge hyperscale hardware, unlocking greater power efficiency, greater physical density and unprecedented flash capacity per total cost of acquisition.

As a disaggregated, shared-everything architecture, VAST’s Universal Storage offering breaks the traditional tight coupling of CPUs and storage media to make it easier to control power utilization. To further help organizations efficiently deploy hyperscale and power-efficient flash archives, VAST Data is also pre-announcing the new Universal Power Control feature (available in 2022), a mechanism that enforces strict limits on system power consumption by intelligently scheduling CPUs to reduce peak power draw by 33 percent.

Benefits of VAST’s updated offering include:

  • Running at just 500 watts per petabyte, VAST Data is able to deliver a system efficiency that is as much as 11x m ore power efficient than enterprise hard-drive based archive systems such as Dell PowerScale A300 and up to 9x more power efficient than competing all-flash scale-out systems such as Pure Storage’s FlashBlade offering.

  • By effectively doubling the capacity of a single Universal Storage system (2U chassis), supported system density and VAST’s game-changing Similarity-Based Data reduction result in a 5x data center density advantage over Dell PowerScale and Pure Storage FlashBlade offerings.

  • The efficiency innovations in VAST software and Universal Storage’s support for high-density hyperscale NVMe media make it possible for companies to finally move all their data onto flash and future-proof their data platform investments to prepare for modern data-centric workloads.

Read this blog post for more technical detail of the power, cost and space-saving benefits of VAST’s 30TB based SSD Universal Storage platform compared to antiquated HDD and even legacy all-flash systems.

With this announcement, we are eliminating all of the arguments for HDD-based infrastructure and making it even easier for customers to reach the all-silicon data center destination we first charted back in 2018,” said VAST Co-Founder Jeff Denworth. “Since our inception, we’ve set out to change the economics of all-flash infrastructure ownership so that companies can confidently and efficiently scale capacity and performance as their datasets grow. We’ve optimized Universal Storage to deliver the performance, capacity and cost profile in a single solution for all data.

Joining other enterprise customers across the globe who have made the move to hyperscale Universal Storage, a large global financial organization has made an investment in VAST for more than 200 petabytes of this new high density enclosure support, enabling them to close their book on the HDD era by consolidating their performance tier and archive into a single low-cost flash cloud. This customer (and others) use Universal Storage to easily and transparently mix and match 15TB and 30TB drives in a single cluster, expanding their hardware across multiple generations of Universal Storage without requiring administrators or application owners to worry about what pool of storage their data is in.

About VAST Data

VAST Data is the data platform company built for the AI era. As the new standard for enterprise AI infrastructure, organizations trust the VAST Data Platform to serve their most data-intensive computing needs. VAST Data empowers enterprises to unlock the full potential of their data by providing AI infrastructure that is simple, scalable, and architected from the ground up to power deep learning and GPU-accelerated data centers and clouds. Launched in 2019, VAST Data is the fastest growing data infrastructure company in history. For more information, please visit and follow VAST Data on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.