Vast Data goes massively larger

As every environmental naturalist and hard core rave fan knows, the jungle is massive and jungle [music] is massive.

Data is also massive, so much so that it can easily be described as vast.

Leaning on the Ronseal (does what it says on the tin) theory of product and company naming conventions, vast data storage and data management company Vast Data looks after, well, vast data.

Now at product iteration version 4, the logically named VASTOS (Ed – it’s a vast storage operating system, so they called it vast OS, yeah we get it) seeks to provide enterprise security and management features designed to harden and simplify data management.

Vast Data goes large

If anything, this is vast data management (or, Vast Data vast data management if you prefer) going bigger than vast, so perhaps going large… or going massive.

The company’s latest release combines additional layers of protocol and data access security, with safeguards against ransomware attacks, access to Vast’s centralised management service and extended data analytics that assist with long-range capacity planning.

As ransomware attacks continue to rise, enterprises need more than just fast backup and disaster recovery. They also need enterprise-grade cybersecurity and consolidated analytics.

Vast Data CEO Renen Hallak insists that providing fast, affordable and safe access to data is his mission.

“Our disaggregated and shared-everything architecture is the foundation for all data within an organisation. Now customers have the only platform they need for their modern applications, including AI, big data, backup, containers and beyond,” said Hallack.

Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research reminds us that organisations need to now develop multilevel cybersecurity strategies to protect themselves against ransomware attacks and rogue actors, all while trying to wrestle petabytes to exabytes of data under management.

“Vast Data is making it simple to deploy and manage data while providing organisations with best-of-breed safeguards for all of their critical data assets,” said Newman.

For over two years, Vast Data says it has eliminated the tradeoffs between high performance and low cost storage capacity with its new storage system concept that makes it possible to manage all of data in a low-cost, all-Flash architecture that is simple to deploy at scale.

New enterprise features

New features here are many and multifarious, but let’s cover a couple.

Policy-Based Data Isolation: VAST’s container pools isolate performance access by providing QOS across pools of highly available containers. With its new VIP-pool view policies, customers can now limit data exports to specific pools and/or VLANs, making it possible to restrict data access along hardware and network boundaries.

This (above feature) is another safeguard in multi-tenant computing environments.

With new data flow monitoring, customers can understand how their applications and users are interacting with Universal Storage (a Vast Data branded product/service). Data Flows explain and visually display performance statistics via a simple-to-use interface and make it easy for administrators to drill down into specific flows.

There is also simplified capacity and data reduction reporting: Universal Storage pioneers a new form of global and finely granular data reduction with its similarity-based data reduction. VASTOS version 4 introduces new fine-grained tools that help customers visualise the consumption of both physical and logical capacity so they can be more intelligent about capacity planning and management.

Universal Storage version 4 is available now.