VAST Data, the lavishly funded all-flash array startup, has announced Q2 revenue growth of 490 per cent, without revealing numbers.
Renen Hallak, VAST Data CEO, said today: “The adoption of Universal Storage continues to accelerate globally. In fact, we were above our very aggressive revenue target for both Q1 and Q2 of this year.”
In April, VAST said its first year of sales were were significantly higher than any storage vendor in IT history without revealing numbers. This sales momentum was good enough to galvanise a $100m VC funding round valuing the company at $1.2bn.
The second 2020 quarter has continued that momentum. VAST says the business surge was due to several large orders from new customers and continued spend from existing customers. Two-thirds of existing customers bought more VAST storage, tripling their original purchases on average. It doubled its number of channel partners Y/Y, and has 100 open job positions.
VAST Data aims to consolidates all enterprise storage tiers onto its single scale-out platform. the company supplies a quad-level flash Universal Storage array, using NVMe-over-Fabrics, Optane SSDs and metadata management and data reduction features. The company claims low latency, high performance throughput at a cost equivalent to the price of enterprise disk storage.
VAST is representative of the rise on the popularity of QLC flash, as vendors extend endurance to enterprise levels through better data write management and wear equalisation across NAND dies in the drives.
For example:
- Pure Storage this week announced a quadrupling of capacity in its QLC-based FlashArray//C with 24TB drives and coming 49TB ones.
- Nimbus Data today announced its huge 64TB capacity ExaDrive NL using QLC flash today.
- StorONE announced a QLC flash array with Optane SSD acceleration in June.
Mendoza
VAST Data has recruited Tom Mendoza, ex-NetApp president and vice chairman, to the board. Mendoza joined NetApp in 1994 and ran sales for six years, becoming President in 2000 and vice-chairman 2019. He retired from the company in 2019 and now sits on several boards.
Mendoza provided an announcement quote: “New applications are driving a set of requirements in data infrastructure that we have never before seen. The market is recognising this as it moves beyond legacy storage offerings and VAST is uniquely positioned to lead this transition. I am thrilled to join VAST’s board and look forward to building the next great independent infrastructure company together.”
