VAST Data announced the release of its latest Universal Storage software platform that addresses a secure, sustainable hyperscale data infrastructure and includes Ceres DBox support for a next-gen NVMe enclosure continuing to leverage NVIDIA’s BlueField DPUs.
Universal Storage software is built upon VAST Data’s disaggregated and shared-everything (DASE) architecture, with new feature updates (versions 4.4 & 4.5) in Universal Storage to enable VAST to power a zero-trust approach to data protection. New and notable security features include:
- Cloud-scale IPv6 networking: Built from the ground up with security in mind, VAST’s support for IPv6 provides the integrated data integrity, authentication, and address scale required by governments and forward-looking organisations building next-generation, cloud-scale data centres.
- Advanced protocol auditing: Universal Storage can now record actions of administrators and storage users. This allows IT admins to export the data to security information and event management (SIEM), or an analytics engine for forensics and threat detection, to find events such as ransomware or rogue insider threats.
- Near-infinite snapshots: Universal Storage has dramatically scaled up the number of snapshots supported in a system to meet the needs of any scale application. Customers can now create hundreds of thousands of snapshots in the system without any of the volume-based limits of legacy solutions and at any directory depth. The Universal Storage snapshots provide an additional layer of data protection and disaster recovery to better safeguard customers from user error and sophisticated cybercriminal activity such as ransomware attacks.
- High-performance in-flight data encryption: VAST now implements NFSv4 Kerberos protocol encryption (krb5p) but without a performance penalty for lower latency and better throughput.
VAST is continuing to develop solutions to help customers reduce their energy footprint for storage and compute in support of environmentally sustainable business practices. To further VAST’s sustainability mission, the new Universal Storage releases also feature:
- Support for low-power NVMe enclosures (Ceres): 4.4 features the general availability of the previously-announced Ceres NVMe enclosure designed and sold by VAST’s hardware partners. Ceres doubles the performance capabilities of Universal Storage while consuming 50% less power and space. Ceres implements industry-leading hardware such as NVIDIA Bluefield DPUs and low-power ARM processors to make it possible to build highly-available flash storage enclosures without the need for power-hungry x86 processors.
- Data-aware compression: VAST builds on its revolutionary Similarity-based data reduction capabilities by dynamically selecting the best encoding method per data type for increased data reduction. On average, this advanced data reduction technique saves customers an additional 30 per cent of storage capacity to save energy, reduce physical storage costs and decrease data centre footprint.
