NEW YORK, Sept. 13, 2022 — VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI-powered world, today released its first Sustainability Report, a data-driven breakdown of how the company’s Universal Storage platform sets the foundation for an environmentally conscious, high-performance data center. Across the industry, vendors have employed sleight of hand to greenwash products, a practice which happens more frequently with the rise of the energy-conscious enterprise.

In this new report, VAST disambiguates the topic and brings real data to the table to help customers and partners understand the implications of data systems architecture.

Organizations around the world are facing two significant challenges: a rapid increase in the amount of data they’re required to manage and compute on, and a growing emphasis on sustainable business practices led by policymakers and stakeholders. Bridging the gap between these seemingly disparate objectives requires data infrastructure that can deliver the right combination of low-power, efficient performance and compelling economics.

VAST delivers up to 90% energy cost savings over a 10-year span for a five petabyte cluster when compared to legacy solutions, and can save up to 50% versus other flash and hybrid storage products when comparing against other new options. Additionally, as customers realize the power of all-flash storage to accelerate their applications, servers also improve in efficiency in the range of 25 to 50%, particularly for transactional, interactive, analytical and machine learning workloads. Since servers are commonly the largest consumers of energy within a data center, this level of compute efficiency realized by VAST customers results in an additional level of energy savings that is often many factors greater than what is saved on storage alone.

“Next generation all-flash doesn’t just provide new opportunities to realize significant storage power efficiency gains, but the conversion to scalable silicon storage also makes compute resources much more efficient. The result: even greater power savings across the data center,” said Jeff Denworth, chief marketing officer and co-founder of VAST Data.

The Four Pillars of Green Data Center Infrastructure

VAST’s Universal Storage architecture unlocks several innovations that drive meaningful and compounding environmental benefits into the data center. Universal Storage features:

• Support for high-density hyperscale flash featuring industry-leading TBs per watt
• Radical storage savings to realize factors of power savings from new data reduction methods
• Low-cost flash with 10 years of endurance to avoid refresh events and save on e-waste
• Enhanced compute efficiency by democratizing all-flash to radically reduce server power draw such that compute-level energy cost savings (alone) can pay for VAST system investments

Comparing VAST’s Universal Storage platform to legacy hybrid systems, VAST storage clusters can cut electricity consumption by nearly 400,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, eliminating approximately 283 metric tons of annual CO2 production per 5PB deployed. While electricity prices vary by market, Universal Storage yields massive savings for customers around the world over a 10-year span — to the tune of more than $500,000 in the United States, and more than $1M in power-constrained countries throughout Europe.

“We believe that within two to three years, power efficiency will become one of the top 5 criteria for enterprise IT infrastructure purchase decisions for organizations with large on-premises IT infrastructure requirements,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. “There is a real difference in the power and cost efficiency of different architectures, just as there is a real difference in scalability. Enterprises would be well-advised to review the architectural differentiators of VAST Universal Storage and how they enable compelling sustainability power efficiencies in the data center.”

According to the United Nations Global E-waste Monitor, electronic waste is one of the fastest-growing waste streams around the world, expected to surpass 74 megatons by 2030.

“The data center space is one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity usage and CO2 emissions, at a time when energy costs are rising and ESG pressures are becoming more common,” said Pavel Molchanov, managing director and equity research analyst, Renewable Energy and Clean Technology Group, Raymond James & Associates. “Data center technologies that can reduce the carbon footprint represent a valuable contribution to the broader decarbonization trend.”

Because VAST’s systems are designed to last for at least a decade, customers can minimize e-waste as part of their larger corporate sustainability efforts. The asymmetric design of the VAST architecture eliminates such e-waste, allowing customers to expand their VAST cluster across multiple generations of hardware.

“Sustainability is a central pillar of this institution’s strategy. When weighing our options on how to modernize our data infrastructure to better serve students and faculty, it was crucial that we factored carbon reduction and waste mitigation into the selection process,” said John Askew, IT Platform Architect at the University of Auckland. “Moving to all-flash and partnering with VAST Data was the clear choice, as Universal Storage allowed us to simultaneously uphold our commitments to environmentally conscious operations and technological innovation.”

Another real-world example is the work being done by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). NREL is transforming energy through the research, development, commercialization and deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. NREL’s mission is to be one of the most energy efficient data centers in the world, and continues to evaluate and deploy breakthrough data storage solutions that enable next generation efficiencies, minimize power consumption and optimize system utilization to reduce power draw. A solution that meets these needs, as well as providing the highest performance, efficient capacity utilization, and be a “campaign storage” that utilizes Infiniband and Ethernet interfaces with a simple S3 and NFS-style mount for its on-premise data requirements, has proven to be highly desirable and easy to implement across all systems, with minimal system administrator resources.

VAST’s Sustainability Guarantee

If a customer can achieve better environmental and economic results from a technically comparable, modern data infrastructure platform, VAST will cover the difference in the form of carbon offset credits. Read the report for additional details behind VAST’s sustainability guarantee.

“When you combine VAST’s approach to crucial areas such as energy efficiency and e-waste reduction, we’re answering the call to today’s energy-conscious enterprises with a, now guaranteed, solution to provide best-in-class infrastructure efficiency and longevity,” added Denworth.

About VAST Data

VAST Data delivers the data platform at the heart of the AI-powered world, accelerating time-to-insight for workload-intensive applications. The performance, scalability, ease of use and cost efficiencies of VAST’s software helps enterprise organizations overcome the historic barriers to building all-flash data centers. Launched in 2019, VAST is the fastest-selling data infrastructure startup in history.

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Source: VAST Data