Vast Data focuses on metadata cataloging, encryption support and snapshots

Flash storage vendor Vast Data has released what it claims is its biggest software release, updating and adding new features around data catalogs that will allow enterprises to tag data with user-defined information and to query datasets that meld structured, unstructured and semi-structured data.

Vast has actually announced two revisions to its software, 4.6 and 4.7. The software itself has no formal name, just a version number. Version 4.6, available now, is a major release, and 4.7, available this spring, will be a minor release, according to Steve Pruchniewski, director of product marketing at VAST. 

“Major feature releases are core to the product’s evolution, where minor feature releases typically contain bug fixes and holdovers from previous feature releases,” Pruchniewski said.

New in 4.6 is the Vast Catalog, which is an extension of the Element Store, a global namespace that defines how Vast storage systems store files and objects and the metadata that describes them. An abstraction layer allows users to access the same element as a file over traditional NFS or as an S3 object when using cloud-native applications.

The Catalog allows Vast clusters to catalog each and every file and object in an extensible tabular format, which enables users to add context to and query the data.

In addition to the Catalog, the 4.6 release adds:

Policy-based quality of service: The new release includes the ability to create different service plans that set minimum and maximum limits on bandwidth and IOPS for each Vast user or view, so that public and private cloud service providers can contain noisy neighbors (another tenant on the same hardware whose activity disrupts your virtual machine).

Enterprise key management: Vast 4.6 adds support for Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) 1.2, which allows tenants to bring and manage their own encryption keys, rotate their keys and use their own encryption. Initial support is offered for Thales CypherTrust and IBM Key Protect.

Global snapshots and global clones: Vast snapshots take a backup snapshot of any namespace depth as often as every 15 seconds. With this new release, Vast clusters now have the ability to share and extend snapshots to multiple remote clusters. Each remote site can mount or clone another site’s snapshots.

Uplink now supports capacity prediction: Uplink, Vast’s cloud-based management console, now comes with a machine-learning tool to predict storage capacity. According to Vast , the tool can normalize trend anomalies that might otherwise confuse a classic statistical model, making for more accurate capacity predictions.

Zero-trust security: Version 4.6 adds zero-trust capability by supporting TLS-based access for NFS, support for pseudo file systems, support for Rocky Linux (a lesser-known enterprise Linux distro) and S3 auditing.