Vast Data: Gemini Enterprise Storage Appliance Model for Age of Hyperscale

Vast Data, Inc. unveiled Gemini, the enterprise storage appliance model reinvented for the age of hyperscale.

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This offering, which disaggregates the business of hardware and software, allows the company to sell managed software on hardware that customers can buy at cost as integrated appliances that ship directly from the manufacturer. With Gemini, the firm has solved many of the greatest hurdles associated with pure software and pure appliance models enabling customers to buy like hyperscale cloud operators without the heavy lifting commonly associated with building always-on, massively scalable clouds of low-cost flash infrastructure.

This offering provides customers the benefits of a software-defined business model in terms of flexibility and cost advantage, but at the same time preserves the simple and multigeneral cluster appliance model that customers have come to love from the company. This event marks the company’s complete transition into a software business and is intended to align firm‘s business objectives precisely with the needs and objectives of its customers.

Gemini is a multi-faceted commercial offering that builds on Universal Storage concept which industry analyst firm IDC has declared as ‘the storage architecture of the future.’

Features include:

• Disaggregated commercial model – Without being constrained by the considerations of running a hardware business, Gemini provides customers with hardware cost transparency, lets customers make investments on their own capacity and time horizon, and provides them with the freedom to dial up their system performance by buying hardware at cost to meet the demands of any intense workload.

• Infinite storage lifecycle – Just as with modern cloud infrastructure that is never taken offline for upgrades or migrations, the asymmetric architecture of Universal Storage supports the ability to extend Gemini subscriptions across multiple gens of hardware that compose, over time, into an exabyte-scale storage cluster where data is never bound to hardware gens and customers never again need to migrate data from system to system.

• Co-Pilot – With Gemini, the company is making the investment in a level 3 engineer that is paired with each new customer. Co-Pilots are constantly monitoring systems, prioritizing your feature requests, and handling all of the planning and deploying as you expand Universal Storage. Co-Pilots are expert cloud operators who work to handle all aspects of system management, planning, expansion, and day-to-day operation.

• Data’s zero compromises guarantee – The firm continues its commitment to 10-year protection of low-cost flash, its commitment to uptime and data durability, its commitment to data reduction supremacy, and its commitment to provide all Universal Storage features as part of Gemini, while also offering an unconditional 60-day right to return. The Zero Compromises Guarantee removes the risk of adopting a new system architecture and is the complement to Gemini as customers move away from legacy HDD-based architectures.

The company has already delivered dozens of petabytes to customers since the launch of this new business model at the turn of the year.

Gemini customers such as Squarepoint Capital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard benefit from the flexibility Gemini provides them as they scale their Universal Storage investments with a solution that is now optimized for each organization’s unique requirements.

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is a enomics institute that has created a pioneering model of biomedical science. With the firm, Gemini provides the institute with an on-demand SaaS solution that meets the its operational and accounting objectives while also supporting the privacy and performance requirements of their on-premises research. Gemini provides the institute with a remotely managed, on-demand cloud that meets any bioinformatics or ML application requirement.

Squarepoint Capital, a world investment firm that is powered by data-driven systematic and quantitative strategies, has leveraged Gemini to more cost-effectively scale up performance beyond their capacity investment to give their traders a 2x performance advantage while saving over 40% on their most recent investment.

With Gemini, organizations can benefit from:

• Financial freedom: Customers can do more with less, realizing up to 90% lower TCO over a 10-year period as they continue to grow and refresh their hardware.

• Freedom of choice: It offers the freedom to expand performance and capacity independently and licenses capacity according to a customer’s needs.

• Freedom from complexity: Universal Storage, managed by a Co-Pilot and expandable through multiple gens of hardware, delivers freedom from refresh-driven downtime, migration headaches, cutovers, and unneeded maintenance that is common with legacy, symmetric architectures.

“After deploying hundreds of petabytes of storage around the world, we’ve learned so much about what our customers want and need,” said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO. “The promise of disaggregation shouldn’t just be about the technology, but equally about how that technology is deployed. Instead of purchasing hardware and software together and being caught up in an endless refresh cycle as we’ve seen for the past 30 years, Gemini offers the freedom, flexibility, and simplicity, all at an affordable cost, that organizations need to deploy an infinite storage lifecycle.“

“Hardware refreshes are a chronic headache for any IT department as any downtime can have a negative impact on business operations,” said Bill Mayo, CIO, Broad Institute. “What we look for are solutions that have the flexibility to scale performance and capacity so we can quickly adjust to the needs of our organization.“

“In the quantitative trading industry, having the flexibility to dial up performance and grow on demand without a forced refresh or hardware tax is a key win for our business,” said Jesse Sieger, systems specialist, Squarepoint Capital, global investment management firm. “Gemini has given us the freedom and flexibility to meet our data center needs at any given time, while also increasing our ROI.“

“Since its inception, Vast‘s mission has centered around breaking longstanding storage tradeoffs,” said Eric Kaplan, CTO, Ahead. “With Gemini, enterprises no longer have to purchase software and hardware at the same time which makes it dramatically simpler to scale their storage deployments.“

“Gemini offers the market an affordable solution to solving what has traditionally been a complex and costly problem of forced refresh cycles between software and hardware,” said Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Vast‘s new deployment model underscores the value and opportunity the industry now has to rethink the relationship between hardware and software and frees organizations from these longstanding constraints.“

“When Vast Data introduced the concept of Universal Storage just over 2 years ago, they vowed to remove the longstanding storage tradeoffs that have plagued the industry for decades,” said Michael Parks, president and COO, Flywheel Data. “With the development of Gemini, VAST continues to address this fundamental idea, providing our customers the flexibility to manage their software and hardware based on current demands.“

Resource:
Blog: Disaggregating to Create the Infinite Storage Lifecycle