NEW YORK – February 17, 2021 – VAST Data, the storage company breaking decades-old tradeoffs, today announced record growth in FY2021 (ending January 31, 2021), finishing the year with a meteoric growth in bookings run rate to over $150M less than two years since launching its Universal Storage platform. Equally important to the company’s hyper-growth, VAST balanced growth with an outsized effort from its global team to achieve cash flow positivity within that same time period – laying a solid foundation as VAST Data builds the next great independent data platform company.
This past year has been one for the record books. We’ve shattered the tradeoffs found in legacy solutions and enabled customers to achieve broad insights from their data across customers and industries that touch all of society,” said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data. “Our Universal Storage platform has broken tradeoffs between performance and capacity, tradeoffs of scale and resilience, tradeoffs of performance and simplicity, and most importantly, it has created a simple and affordable path for our customers to make their valuable data assets ready for the machine learning era.
VAST’s rapid growth and substantial market opportunity are a direct result of organizations furthering their innovation agendas with performance-intensive applications including content, research, AI, machine learning and advanced analytics. These applications require fast, scalable and consistent access to data in real-time. VAST’s Universal Storage platform eliminates the complexity of managing data by bringing an end to storage tiering and by allowing companies to scale and access all of their data when they need it at the speed of flash.
Record-Setting Customer Adoption for Universal Storage as Organizations Discard Legacy Infrastructure
As organizations begin to rethink their IT infrastructure needs, VAST has seen significant customer adoption both in terms of the number of its customers as well as single customer investments. Over the past several weeks, VAST has announced that it now has numerous customers who have made $10M+ investments in its Universal Storage platform. VAST customers cut across a range of industries including banking, media, internet, healthcare, manufacturing and government with customers such as Invitae, the US Defense Department, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and several of the world’s leading quantitative trading firms representing a total of $1 trillion of assets under management.
Strengthened Executive Team with Several Key Appointments – Projected To Grow Employee Headcount More Than 2x Over The Next Year
As customers continue to adopt VAST at a blistering pace, the company added more than 80 employees over the past year to support this incredible business momentum, along with several key executives including former NetApp President and Vice Chairman Tom Mendoza, who became the company’s first independent board member.
Additional appointments to the company’s leadership team include:
Peter Gadd, Vice President of International Sales
David Noy, Vice President of Product Management
Daniel Bounds, Vice President of Marketing
Helen Protopapas, Vice President of Finance
Tom Whaley, Vice President of Sales
Rick Franke, Vice President of Global Customer Success, Services and Support
The company plans to add another 200 positions in 2021. For more information about those roles, please visit vastdata.com/careers.
VAST Spearheads Product Innovation Leading to Numerous Industry Accolades
Alongside VAST’s strong business growth this year, the company continued to push the envelope on the innovation front including several new product introductions:
In April 2020, VAST launched Version 3 of Universal Storage, which includes more than 20 new features and introduces new capabilities for enterprise and media customers.
VAST announced its certification as a solution provider for Intel Select Solutions for Genomics Analytics, working with Intel to help organizations eliminate the guesswork around building modern analytics infrastructure.
VAST launched LightSpeed, its next-generation storage architecture, in September 2020, combining the light-touch of VAST’s simple NAS appliance experience with leadership-class performance for NVIDIA® GPU-based and AI processor-based computing, taking the guesswork and configuration out of scaling up AI infrastructure.
In January 2021, VAST unveiled its new reference architecture based on NVIDIA DGX™A100 systems and VAST’s Universal Storage platform designed to significantly increase storage performance for AI use cases.
As a result of the company’s commitment to innovation, VAST received several industry recognitions for its game-changing technology:
TechTarget: VAST won gold in the Enterprise Data Storage Products of 2020, for the second consecutive year.
Gartner: VAST was recognized as a Cool Vendor by Gartner in 2020 and was also highlighted in the 2020 Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies report.
Goldman Sachs: Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO, was recognized as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of the year for the second year in a row.
CRN: VAST was recognized as an Emerging Vendor in 2020.
Supporting Quotes
The market opportunity for Universal Storage is massive. The importance of AI and machine learning for organizations across the globe has resulted in the need for organizations to adopt new technologies that modernize their data and enable fast access to vast reserves of data.
Dror Nahumi, General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners.
Data has continued to be the most strategic asset for businesses and VAST has innovated a system architecture that blends storage technologies such as NVMe over Fabrics, storage class memory and low-cost commodity flash with new efficiency, resilience and access algorithms that make it possible to get the greatest value from these assets,” said Eric Burgener, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies at IDC. “Thanks to these advancements, flash storage is now ready for large-capacity scale in today’s data-intensive world.