VAST Data’s New Platform Update Aims to Simplify AI Workflows and Hybrid Cloud Operations on AWS

LAS VEGAS, Dec. 1, 2023 — VAST Data announced that the company has unveiled its newest software release, version 5.0, extending the capabilities of the VAST Data Platform with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable significant cloud cost savings of up to 80 percent.

Today, AWS customers can streamline and accelerate their AI workflows and optimize hybrid cloud deployments across multiple AWS regions via a single control plane. With the VAST Data Platform, organizations benefit from enterprise data management capabilities and infrastructure efficiencies to easily manage files, objects, and tables wherever computation happens. Additionally, cloud-native organizations can now start their journey with VAST in the cloud to gain access to the transformative capabilities of the VAST Data Platform.

As an AWS Partner, VAST offers organizations an alternative to existing approaches to data management, where they would otherwise need to seek out and integrate independent enterprise NAS solutions, object storage, parallel file systems and data warehouse tools in order to build end-to-end data pipelines. For the first time, enterprises can now consolidate all of their structured and unstructured data management into a unified data platform that can be deployed across private clouds and all AWS regions.

By unifying a multi-modal data management environment, organizations can avoid incurring excess infrastructure costs by eliminating cross-protocol data sprawl and leveraging VAST’s unique Similarity-based data reduction to further reduce the cost of data infrastructure.

Among the joint customers leveraging the VAST Data Platform on AWS is the Allen Institute:
“Every day we collect hundreds of terabytes of new data for neural genomics research, and we manage these massive datasets across our own private clouds and AWS for rapid, global data access,” said David Feng, Director of Scientific Computing at the Allen Institute. “The VAST Data Platform makes it simple for the Allen Institute to rapidly share and process data anywhere. These new hybrid cloud enhancements give our researchers and partners easy-to-use tools to build global AI pipelines that facilitate and accelerate our pursuit of new scientific discoveries.”

In addition, as part of software update 5.0, VAST unveiled new capabilities and enhancements, including:

• Multi-Protocol Namespace on AWS – VAST offers the first data platform that combines multiple protocols (SMB, NFS, S3, and DataBase tables) into a single namespace, allowing users to read and write data from any protocol and eliminating the data silos and unnecessary copies caused by independent data systems.
• Multi-Cluster Manager for AWS Instances – Organizations can now manage and deploy VAST clusters across private clouds and AWS, streamlining cloud bursting workflows and multi-region availability. This intuitive UI simplifies the creation, management, and connection between VAST clusters so customers can transparently access data for AI workflows across the globe.
• Intelligent Anomaly Detection – Using machine learning, every VAST cluster is now able to report on anomalous user events and data behaviors. Anomalies are then reported to administrators via the VAST Data Uplink call home service. This new service allows customers to detect ransomware attacks, anomalous API calls, as well as other unusual data access patterns in VAST clusters both on-premises and running in the cloud.
• Real-Time Audit Log Analytics – The VAST Data Platform now enables audit logs to be directly streamed into and queried from the VAST DataBase, making it easy to log user and administrator activities. This new offering provides security teams with real-time insight into incidents without requiring external Security Event and Incident Management (SEIM) systems.
• New Acceleration for the VAST DataBase – The VAST DataBase is specifically designed for transactional and analytical database services that extend the benefits of a flash-optimized, real-time architecture all the way to the archive. Version 5.0 supports the release of new database functionality such as projections and additional predicate pushdown, allowing the system to dramatically reduce query times and accelerate time to insight.

“The VAST Data Platform is the simplest, fastest, most efficient and most secure way for customers to achieve AI-powered insights from all of their data, across private and public clouds,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder of VAST Data. “Today we’re enabling customers to quickly deploy VAST across AWS regions and establish inter-cluster relationships for data availability – making it that much easier for cloud-native organizations to take advantage of the VAST Data Platform.”

The VAST Data Platform version 5.0 will be generally available in December 2023.

About VAST Data

VAST Data is the data platform software company for the AI era. Accelerating time to insight for workload-intensive applications, the VAST Data Platform delivers scalable performance, radically simple data management and enhanced productivity. Launched in 2019, VAST is the fastest growing data infrastructure company in history.

Source: VAST Data