Today, VAST DATA released a storage platform with a delightful name, LightSpeed. VAST Data released Universal Storage 1.0 as their first product just last year. Vast Data has gone through four rounds of funding since its founding in 2016, two series A, one series B, and one series C.
Today, VAST DATA released a storage platform with a delightful name, LightSpeed. VAST Data released Universal Storage 1.0 as their first product just last year. Vast Data has gone through four rounds of funding since its founding in 2016, two series A, one series B, and one series C.
VAST LightSpeed storage platform is built on top of VAST’s Universal Storage DASE storage architecture (DisAggregated, Shared Everything). Briefly, VAST’s Universal Storage architecture is designed to allow servers to scale nearly infinitely by ensuring each server has full access to all the media in its cluster to eliminate expensive coordination between servers in a cluster. Our previous coverage goes into more depth on this topic. Because VAST LightSpeed is built on top of VAST’s Universal Storage DASE storage architecture, it calls for all-flash (currently qlc) hardware. As an all-flash design, there is no tiering, so all data is accessed equally quickly.
According to the company, VAST’s new LightSpeed NVMe storage enclosure delivers twice the throughput of previous VAST hardware generations. LightSpeed clusters are available in three configurations. The Line is made up of 2 LightSpeed Nodes to provide 80GB/s of bandwidth using 32 GPUs. The Pentagon is made up of 5 LightSpeed Nodes to provide 200GB/s of bandwidth using 80 GPUs. The Decagon is made up of 10 LightSpeed Nodes to provide 400GB/s of bandwidth using 160 GPUs.
VAST is also currently collaborating with NVIDIA to make use of NVIDIA ‘s GPUDirect Storage technology. GPUDirect enables customers running NVIDIA GPUs skip several steps in the traditional data pipeline. Specifically, GPUDirect cuts out the creation of extra data copies between storage and the GPU, bypassing both the CPU and CPU memory altogether for significant performance gains. VAST hopes to be able to use these performance gains to offer a product that does away with the complexity and cost of HPC file systems entirely in favor of a pure NFS architecture.
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