Vast Data: Big shifts promised for an AI future

Vast Data will triple engineering investment and promises "very ambitious products" as the company orients towards a future in which machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate IT and investment around it. That's according to chief marketing officer Jeff Denworth, who spoke to Computer Weekly this week. He set out a vision of Vast as a rapidly rising star with a product that fits a future of very large volumes of data – generated from machine and human activity – from which organisations will want to quickly gain insight. Vast Data sells what it calls Universal Storage, based on bulk, relatively cheap and rapidly accessible QLC flash with Optane (or near-equivalent) fast cache to smooth input/output. It is file storage, mostly suited to unstructured or semi-structured data, and Vast envisages it as large pools of datacentre storage, an alternative to the cloud. Despite the tie to specific hardware, Vast sells only software – it's based on a containerised control plane – and with customers able to monitor and control fleets of Vast deployments anywhere across the globe via Uplink Cloud Management.