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Starting later than Snowflake and Databricks was VAST Data's biggest advantage
“And so I think our The biggest advantage versus those other companies that you mentioned is that we started late, and that allowed us to see this deep learning problem in front of our eyes versus machine learning, again, a lot smaller, a lot slower, and it als…”
VAST Data employs only two product managers for 750 employees
“You'll find we're 750 people. We have two product managers in the company.”
VAST Data has been cash-flow positive for nearly five years
“Efficiency, we've been cashflow positive on average for four and a half, five years now.”
VAST Data achieves stateless compute by exposing data across the network
“Every node can now see the entirety of the data set. Data on low cost flash, metadata on storage class memory, all on the other side of the network, such that they become stateless, And they don't need to talk to each other anymore, and so now you have the mos…”
Row and column database complexity stems from legacy hard drive limitations
“Row-based databases and column-based databases. That all stems from storage. It stems from hard drives needing to be sequential. If we can give different views into the same information, then you don't need that complexity.”
VAST Data builds its software stack internally instead of using open-source
“Everything is our own or almost everything is our own. We don't use open source nearly as much as other companies do.”
Operating large AI clusters currently requires PhD-level computer science expertise
“Today, in many cases, you still need a PhD in computer science to operate a large AI cluster.”
VAST Data sold an exabyte of storage to a 30-person company
“We just sold an exabyte to a company with less than 30 people.”
VAST Data reached a $9 billion valuation by consistently tripling growth
“The fact that we're worth nine billion dollars now, which is staggering, is because we keep tripling.”
VAST Data is expanding platform to include compute functionality
“We're adding compute functionality, basically trying to be that middle of the sandwich, ah, taking advantage of latest and greatest in hardware underneath us and to give Applications, the easiest APIs on top of us.”
VAST Data has sold over $1 billion worth of software
“Revenue, we've sold more than a billion dollars worth of software so far in the last few years.”
VAST Data is growing revenue 2.5x to 3x year-over-year
“Growth, we've been growing at about two and a half to three X year over year.”
AI model training requires fast access to all historical data
“AI doesn't conform to that model. You need fast access to everything in order to build an AI model.”
VAST scales capacity independently from performance via NVMe over Fabrics
“We put the drives on one side of the network, we put the logic on the other side, and we leverage a new protocol called NVMe over Fabrics to make it look like All of those drives are directly attached. That allows us to scale capacity independently from perfor…”
VAST Data enables native SQL querying directly on Parquet objects
“You can write a parquet object and then query it using SQL natively off of our platform without needing any higher layers on top.”
Strict data laws drive the need for global federated AI training
“In some cases, it's not allowed to move data out of Germany, but you can run a federated training job that's global, and so that again gives us an ability to do things that couldn't be done before.”
VAST Data targets organizations managing 100 petabytes of data
“If it's a hundred terabytes, that's not interesting to us. If it's a hundred petabytes, it's really interesting.”
VAST open-sources peripheral plugins while keeping its core platform proprietary
“We open source things on the periphery. If there's a plugin, if there's an interface, if there's a way to connect to other solutions, that piece we will open source. But the core of the platform is proprietary.”
VAST Data considers NVIDIA its strongest and most natural partner
“NVIDIA, I would say, is our best and most natural partner.”
VAST Data's CEO ignores Slack entirely, relying on calls and texts
“I don't open Slack. I'm probably the only person in the company that doesn't use Slack, but if something is important enough, someone will text me or call me, and that's how I run my day.”
VAST Data explicitly operates without hierarchy or internal titles
“As you grow, and as you grow at this pace, you have to explicitly tell people that you can leave a meeting in the middle, and that you shouldn't waste time on internal crap, and that titles don't matter within the company, and that we don't have a hierarchy. W…”
XtremIO reached $3 billion in sales two years after EMC acquisition
“We hit three billion dollars in two years as part of EMC, of course.”
R&D makes up more than half of VAST Data's workforce
“So R&D is more than half the company and even within the go-to-market teams, I would Say more than half the people are sales engineers and technical people.”
Legacy scale-out storage systems relied on shared-nothing sharding
“So every scale out system that I am aware of before VAST is based loosely speaking on a concept called shared nothing sharding.”
VAST Data allocates up to 20% of R&D to future projects
“We always try to have at least 10 to 20% of R&D On advanced development, on future projects, have 10 to 20% of R&D interfacing with the field, fixing problems, and adding small features that are required, and then the bulk of the team is, of course, building t…”
VAST Data spent up to 18 months designing before writing code
“It took us about a year, year and a half before we really started writing code in earnest because we went through those design phases.”