VAST Data says it's still a storage company at heart, says shortages a 'wake-up call to the flash vendors' to build more

VAST Data's top tier execs insisted that the firm had not left its storage roots behind last week and said it could be the biggest provider of storage infrastructure by the end of this year.

But they also said the storage industry and customers needed to rethink how they build and use storage given SSD manufacturers’ inability to keep up with demand thanks to the datacenter boom.

Speaking to journalists at its VAST Forward event in Salt Lake City last week, CEO Renen Hallak, said storage remained at the core of its business, despite its more recent self-identification as an AI OS firm. 

“The foundation of it is what we call the VAST DataStore. It's what everything else is built on top of. It exposes more and more interfaces as time goes by. So, we started with NFS, and then we added S3 then we added NFSv4and SMB 2.1 and SMB 3, and we added NFS over RDMA and GPU direct.”

He said, “If you look at our engineering team today, a very, very large portion of it is still developing data store related functionality. We're very proud of that.”

And storage remains a challenge, the execs admitted, with current shortages of SSDs, and even HDDs creating ripple effects throughout the tech sector. 

“It's a wake-up call to the flash vendors that they need to build a lot more,” Hallak said. The flash builders had been able to grow about 20 percent a year, Hallak said. “We need them to grow 200 percent year over year in order to fulfill this demand.”

VAST had been tripling every year in terms of revenue and capacity, he said. “And so, when you're small, nobody notices. But once you get to a certain level of size, that becomes the entire market. That's the way exponential curves work.”

A few more “tripling” years, he said, “and we're way, way, way bigger than the entire market.”

Fellow cofounder Jeff Denworth added, “If we hit our targets, we will easily be the largest commercial provider of storage infrastructure in the world this year. We're already nearly there, so it's big part of our business, but that also is the foundation.”

As to why the industry is facing a disk crunch now, Hallak said, “It's because all of this old data that was sitting on hard drives and tape and on slow media and that only people could see, so it never needed to be accessed quickly.”

But, he continued, “Now it’s needing to be trained on and inferred on and fine tuned on by all of these very, very fast, very hungry GPUs and TPUs.” Which means it has to be moved across to fast media, “very very quickly.”

And that’s before new data is taken into account from proliferating sensors, higher resolution cameras, and other devices.

The problem should be solved in about two or three years from now as SSD makers build out manufacturing capacity. “In the meantime, it will also get solved because datacenter market for them is relatively small. The consumer market is 10 times bigger, and so they are taking from consumer and bringing into datacenter.”

This represents an opportunity for VAST. Denworth said, “When we started the company. We worked a lot on making infrastructure much more efficient so that you didn't use much hardware.”

Historically that had been a story about saving customers money, he said, but “for the last, let's say, three months or so, it's we're just going to reduce the amount of flash that you need.”

And, added Jonsi Steffanson, VAST’s recently recruited cloud boss, there was simply an awful lot of waste, with companies migrating and replicating data to the cloud rather than using technology – such as VAST – to manage data more efficiently. 

VAST’s global namespace approach, he said, allowed customers to cache data rather than constantly replicating everything. “We have customers that discovered that they had 21 copies of the same data sets.”

“We're only software,” says Hallak.” “And so we encourage our customers to keep using their hardware for a decade, for more than a decade, because it's working, so there's no reason to replace it.” Systems companies had an interest in getting customers to replace their hardware every few years, he said. “And I think customers like our model better.”