High-end all-flash file storage startup VAST Data has picked up a second $10 million-plus sale in the same month it announced $10 million in US DoD orders, and a month after two customers ordered $20 million of its products.
In contrast, Dell Technologies has announced a slowdown in its overall storage array business. We understand VAST competes with Dell’s Isilon (PowerScale), ECS, and Data Domain (PowerProtect) products.
Jeff Denworth, co-founder and CMO at VAST, provided an announcement quote: “We’re thrilled to be able to deliver on a storage experience that is as smooth as a Sunday drive. With VAST, customers no longer need to worry about slow-performing datasets — so much so that we have made cloud storage infrastructure an afterthought for them.”
The latest customer is a US-headquartered major auto manufacturer — its name has not been disclosed. It is using VAST Universal Storage kit to store automotive design data, next-generation intelligent vehicle datasets, enterprise backup, application workloads and containerised big data applications.
The VAST storage is being deployed by this customer in every new core and edge data center globally. VAST says the systems will achieve radical savings over what it terms “legacy” all-flash systems. As all-flash systems only started becoming mainstream in the post-2010 timeframe, this is a bit rich.
Vehicle manufacturers are collecting more and more data from vehicles, and will be processing more data inside vehicles as they become more intelligent. The car business has become a data-intensive industry and we can start thinking of smart cars as edge data centers on wheels.
Who could this customer be? We’re thinking it could be any one of Ford, GM or Tesla.