VAST Data Expands Platform With Block Storage And Real-Time Event Streaming

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VAST Data, a company specializing in high-performance data platforms for AI and large-scale data processing, has made a couple of significant announcements related to unifying real-time data processing and storage.

The company has added universal storage capabilities to its flagship Vast DataStore offering. It claims this makes it the industry’s first “fully unified” data platform for artificial intelligence workloads. 

The upgrade aims to eliminate the need for multiple, separate storage systems, allowing businesses to consolidate their infrastructure and simplify data management. The company said that the new capabilities cater to all types of workload, without any trade-offs in performance, costs, or scalability. 

“Our vision for the VAST Data Platform was always to enable organizations to process, analyze, and act on data in real-time, empowering them to scale effortlessly, reduce their infrastructure costs, and innovate faster by unifying AI data infrastructure within a single, powerful platform,” said Aaron Chaisson, Vice President, Product & Solutions Marketing at VAST Data. With today’s announcement, we’re eliminating the data silos that once hindered AI and analytics initiatives, affording customers faster, more accurate decisions and unlocking data-driven growth.”

According to VAST Data, the upgrade allows it to meet Garnter’s definition of multiprotocol storage platforms, which are “designed to support multiple storage access protocols and address the growing needs of businesses.” 

Key features of the upgrade include support for environments such as VMware, Hyper-V, and other hypervisors. The platform is also optimized for Kubernetes and containerized applications. Companies often use both virtualized and containerized systems, which can make managing different storage systems difficult. The VAST Data Platform has simplified this by combining both types of systems into one unified storage system.

The new features also include Boot from SAN, which enables businesses to deploy and manage servers without relying on local disks. This improves redundancy, simplifies provisioning, and enhances disaster recovery. 

The new block storage functionality will be available next month as part of the VAST Data Platform. 

While VAST’s move toward unified storage is promising, its block storage capabilities are still evolving. For example, the platform supports only NVMe-over-Ethernet currently. It lacks traditional Fibre Channel and iSCSI support. Also, it does not offer remote direct memory access (RDMA). However, VAST Data has road-mapped some of these features for future releases. 

In the other major announcement, VAST Data unveiled VAST Event Broker – a real-time event streaming engine that unifies transactional and analytical data. The platform leverages AI agents to dynamically act on incoming data to deliver real-time intelligence and automation. 

Businesses today face numerous challenges with traditional event streaming systems. These older architectures often come with rigid designs and separate data silos, making it difficult to process and analyze data efficiently. This can lead to inefficiencies like infrastructure sprawl and slow data processing. 

VAST Data claims that the engine delivers more than 10x the performance of legacy Kafka implementations. This translates to having the ability to process over 500 million messages per second and provide unlimited linear scalability.

As a unified AI data platform, VAST Event Broker is designed to simplify data management by bringing transactional, analytical, AI, and real-time streaming workloads under a single architecture. What this means is that instead of data moving between external servers and slowing down, it can be streamed directly into Vast’s DataStore.

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Commenting on the debut of the VAST Event Broker, Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder of VAST Data, emphasized its transformative impact on real-time data processing. “The launch of the VAST Event Broker marks a fundamental shift in the market for real-time data processing,” said Denworth. 

“By merging event streaming, analytics, and AI into a single platform, VAST is removing decades of data pipeline inefficiencies and event streaming complexity, empowering organizations to detect fraud in milliseconds, correlate intelligence signals globally, act on data-driven insights instantly, and deliver AI-enabled customer experiences. This is the future of real-time intelligence, built for the AI era.”

The new features allow the platform to run serverless functions, which helps automate data processing and provides real-time insights. Additionally, GPU-Direct capabilities enable fast data transfers between storage and GPUs, optimizing performance for demanding applications.

The VAST Event Broker is scheduled to be available in March.