Simplifying and securing universal storage

As ransomware attacks continue to rise, enterprises need more than just fast backup and disaster recovery. They also need enterprise-grade cybersecurity and consolidated analytics. Many of the world’s most innovative companies already trust Universal Storage for their critical data sets, including a major U.S. automaker, a genomics research firm and a global quantitative research organisation. 

“Data is the lifeblood of every organisation, and providing fast, affordable and safe access to that data is our mission,” said Renen Hallak, co-founder and CEO of VAST. “Our Disaggregated and Shared Everything architecture is the foundation for all data within an organisation. Now customers have the only platform they need for their modern applications, including AI, big data, backup, containers, and beyond.”

New Enterprise Security Features 

• Ransomware Protection with Indestructible Snapshots: The average cost of ransomware remediation in the U.S. is now over $2M and the business continuity impact can be catastrophic. VAST Data’s indestructible snapshots provide customers with an additional layer of ransomware protection. This ensures that their critical read-only snapshots and snapshot policies are immutable, protecting them from accidental deletion and rogue admins and attackers who gain privileged system credentials. 

• NFS 4.1: VAST Data’s native implementation of NFS 4.1 offers built-in security and performance features for regulated and security-minded organisations, including support for: 

• Kerberos version 5 for secure authentication/authorisation 

• NFS 4 access control lists (ACLs), integrated file and byte-range locking for fine-grained and secure permissions to files and directories

• Support for NFS 4 nconnect, which maximises NFS performance by providing multiple network connections between the NFS client and the storage port. With nconnect, customers are no longer restricted by the throughput limitations of a single TCP connection.

• Policy-Based Data Isolation: VAST’s container pools isolate performance access by providing QOS across pools of highly-available containers. With its new VIP-pool view policies, customers can now limit data exports to specific pools and/or VLANs, making it possible to restrict data access along hardware and network boundaries. This is another safeguard in multi-tenant computing environments. 

Simplified Systems Management 

• Uplink Cloud Management: VAST Data’s Uplink enables customers to monitor all their Universal Storage clusters anywhere in the world by accessing the same centralised portal that VAST’s Co-Pilot and support teams use to manage the global fleet of Universal Storage systems. This centralised, cloud-based management pane provides a consolidated view into an enterprise’s Universal Storage environments and is the basis for 360° customer experiences.

• Data Flow Monitoring: With new data flow monitoring, customers can understand how their applications and users are interacting with Universal Storage. Data Flows explain and visually display performance statistics via a simple-to-use interface and make it easy for administrators to drill down into specific flows. 

• Simplified Capacity and Data Reduction Reporting: Universal Storage pioneers a new form of global and finely granular data reduction with its similarity-based data reduction. VASTOS version 4 introduces new fine-grained tools that help customers visualise the consumption of both physical and logical capacity so they can be more intelligent about capacity planning and management.

For over two years, VAST Data has eliminated the tradeoffs between high performance and low cost storage capacity, pioneering a new storage system concept that makes it possible to manage all of your data in a low-cost, all-flash architecture that is simple to deploy at scale. These new features in VASTOS V4 make it safer and simpler for enterprises to end storage tiering and data management complexity. 

“The demands placed upon data within today’s modern business are staggering,” said Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner, Futurum Research. “Organisations need to now develop multilevel cybersecurity strategies to protect themselves against ransomware attacks and rogue actors, all while trying to wrestle petabytes to exabytes of data under management. VAST Data is making it simple to deploy and manage data while providing organisations with best-of-breed safeguards for all of their critical data assets.”