High-end, all-flash, enterprise filer supplier VAST Data has appointed George Axberg, a 16-year Dell EMC veteran, as its VP of the Data Protection division.
We’re told he is responsible for leading and expanding VAST Data’s position within the Data Protection and Security market, as well as defining VAST Data’s sales strategy and execution plans. The aim is to apply VAST’s Universal Storage to all data protection use cases and establish the company as the essential data protection storage platform.
VAST Data president Michael Wing said: “His expertise and leadership at VAST will help drive the next major inflection point in data protection applications: the move from disk to all-flash architectures.”
Do we smell FlashBlade competition coming?
Pure Storage FlashBlade
Pure’s FlashBlade, launched in March 2016, has reached the billion dollar sales level. It is an all-flash array marketed as a fast restore, data protection, backup target system, and pioneered the all-flash backup storage target market. The system has an effective maximum capacity of 3.3PB.
FlashBlade uses TLC (3bits/cell) NAND whereas VAST uses less expensive QLC (4bits/cell) flash. Pure positions FlashBlade as a backup storage system, separate from and alongside its primary storage FlashArray. VAST says its Universal Storage system, launched in February 2019, three years after FlashBlade arrived, supports both primary and secondary (backup) use cases and can scale out to multiple petabytes.
It says customers can deploy Universal Storage to restore and recover thousands of virtual machines in minutes, not hours, and at a cost that is comparable to hard-drive-based backup appliances.
Axberg said: “VAST Data’s all-flash storage architecture can help companies recover data up to 50 times faster than HDD-based systems. This is the biggest thing to happen to backup targets since they moved from tape to disk 20 years ago.”
