VAST Data heading to the public cloud

Hybrid multi-cloud IT environments are becoming popular with suppliers building storage environments that span both on-premises and public cloud worlds.

Some file storage suppliers such as NetApp are making their software available in AWS, Azure, and GCP. Weka has a similar strategy, as does Qumulo and Dell EMC with PowerScale for multi-cloud as part of its Project Alpine. It’s about having a form of global file system and services across the private-public multi-cloud environment.

We wondered about VAST Data’s view on this concept. Is its software going to be ported to one or more public clouds? If not, what is the rationale? If it is being or has been ported, how does its performance and functionality compare to the on-premises VAST Data Universal Storage system?

Jeff Denworth says VAST Data is headed for the public cloud
Jeff Denworth

Co-founder and CMO Jeff Denworth told us: “VAST is working with public cloud (and private cloud) providers to build foundational VAST-powered services and is also building a stack which is portable across any cloud platform.

“We’ve designed our software on containers and have had a flexible commodity hardware agenda since day one – all of this makes the effort of moving platforms relatively easily.

“The details around both of these efforts will be announced over the next few months. As with all things VAST, you can expect this to be more than a me-too effort – we’re working to bring real innovation to the party.”

VAST has two development initiatives, the first being foundational VAST-powered services that work on-premises, in a private cloud, and in public clouds. We can assume that the three main public clouds would be involved in this. What might these services be? They must be in addition to those already present on the VAST operating system as the second prong is to build a software stack that can run on various cloud platforms, with AWS, Azure, and GCP as obvious targets.

We expect that VAST will aim to make its public cloud manifestations as performant as its on-premises systems.

Perhaps clues about the data services direction can be found in prior statements by VAST’s executives that indicated it is planning to develop data infrastructure software to provide a data science platform. We explored this concept in an article looking at the influence of defunct supercomputing outfit Thinking Machines on VAST in March.

It will be worth paying close attention to VAST’s announcements over the coming months to see if these expectations are correct.