From our understanding, it didn't touch their past $40 million round raised in February 2019 (see table below) due to rapid sales results. With this new round, $140 million are not touched at all. Most recent $100 million is the highest round by a storage company this year after the $250 million that got last week Cohesity, in a total of only financial 12 rounds since January 2020 compared to 34 in 2019.
Total of $180 million invested in VAST Data includes:
| Date | Amount raised* | Investors | |
| A | 15 | Northwest Venture Partners (NVP), 83North | |
| A | 25 | NVP, 83North, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs | |
| B | 40 | NVP, 83North, Dell Technologies Capital | |
| C | 100 | Next47 GmbH, NVP, 83 North, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners LLC, Mellanox Capital, Commonfund Capital |
VAST Data also makes history with this round being the fastest storage company to reach $1 billion valuation in less than 18 months, the second is Rubrik, then Nutanix, Cohesity and Pure Storage, all recent players who believe in radical new approaches and designs in their respective segments. VAST Data will be added to the Coldago Research Storage Unicorn June 2020 report.
The following table lists investment in file storage with pure players but also unified storage vendors and ISVs active in storage like Red Hat:
| Companies | Year founded | Total raised* | |
| Red Hat (public, acq. by IBM) |
1999 | NA | NA |
| Quobyte | 2013 | NA | 3 |
| Rozo | 2010 | 0.75 | 1 |
| DDN | 1998 | 9.9 | 1 |
| Exablox (acq. by StorageCraft) |
2010 | 52.5 | 4 |
| WekaIO | 2014 | 66.7 | 3 |
| Elastifile | 2014 | 74 | 4 |
| Avere | 2008 | 86 | 5 |
| Panzura | 2008 | 90 | 5 |
| Nasuni | 2009 | 147 | 10 |
| Panasas | 2000 | 155.1 | 9 |
| VAST Data | 2016 | 180 | 3 |
| Qumulo | 2012 | 222.3 | 6 |
| BlueArc (acq. by HDS) |
1998 | 224 | 7 |
| Tintri (public, acq. by DDN) |
2008 | 260 | 4 |
| Infinidat | 2001 | 325 | 3 |
| Pure Storage (public) |
2009 | 530.9 | 8 |
| Pillar Data (acq. by Oracle) |
2001 | 544 | NA |
| Cohesity | 2013 | 660 | 5 |
We don't mention Stellus Technologies in this table as this is very opaque and we wait more real market facts about it.
As you may have noticed, NVP has also invested in WekaIO, also in file storage, but the surprise comes from the fact that both companies have Dror Nahumi, partner at NVP, as board member.
The company has made a spectacular entrance into the IO500 ranking last November demonstrating that a super fast NAS can participate in this battle. They jumped into the 18th position followed by 2 Qumulo references also validating NFS.
File storage is hot and will be hot again for quite some time. Innovations at various level feed the sector with engineers breaking classic approaches with new ideas and real developments fueled by some hardware innovations as well. It explains a few recent stories and moves, listed in the table above. Google made a strange acquisition with Elastifile, Azure picked a serious player with Avere, IBM absorbed Red Hat in a huge transaction - some products are related to storage like Gluster, Ceph even Sistina in the past -, Exablox got acquired by StorageCraft even if Dell Technologies Capital was an investor like in Elastifile. Does it mean something for Dell having the challenge to find or build the successor of Isilon with current flash, SCM/PM, NVMe, NVMe-over-Fabrics, KV stores and AI in mind. They didn't swallow and finally ignore Elastifile and Exablox probably for good reasons.
The mission of VAST Data is to abolish the multi-tier approach by promoting an all flash tier for all use cases.
The team shakes the file storage segment with design choices:
- The architecture philosophy named DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything) that decouples the compute layer from the storage layer offering different scalability for each layer,
- Stateless, no cache, no NVRAM... on compute nodes, everything is stored at the storage level connected to all compute nodes via NVMe-oF (RDMA),
- Storage Class Memory (SCM) with Intel Optane today to make (3) writes persistent, accessible from all compute nodes via the fabric,
- NVMe QLC Flash for the final destination of data,
- Data protection with erasure coding with 40+4 and 150+4 meaning 3% overhead with soon 500+8,
- Data reduction with 20:1 ratio,
- An internal transaction (log-structured) file system working as redirect-on-write, this file system is internal i.e not seen from outside,
- NFS v3, NFS over RDMA and S3 access methods with the capability to access the same content via NFS and S3.
We expect the firm to release SMB soon, a replication and a DR feature to see the company consider some data processing on the compute layer, and some PCIe4 NVMe devices coming, so we anticipate also a new performance gain in the near future. CXL will also help later.
The product is named Universal Storage and finally confirmed what was predicted in 2012 with an U3 platform - Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous - 8 years ago on File Storage Technologies blog (in French). In a nutshell, the idea is to multiply use cases, consolidating several unstructured data-based applications towards one single platform making it universal. The second dimension, Unified, is the capability to offer multiple access methods from the same platform and make primary and secondary storage convergent. Last the Ubiquitous term refers to access wherever users and applications reside, today it's essentially covered by S3. So a modern data platform should be able to store, protect, serve and even process data.
In Flash Memory Summit 2019 special report flash, SSD and NVMe software are almost exclusively developed and controlled by Israeli people. This is the case for Toshiba Kumoscale coming from OCZ acquisition in 2013, XIV acquired by IBM in 2008, XtremIO and ScaleIO acquired by EMC in 2012 and 2013 respectively, Annapurna Labs acquired by AWS in 2015 and a few months ago E8 Storage, Plexistor acquired by NetApp in 2017, Kaminario, Reduxio, Lightbits Labs, Excelero, Elastifile, Infinidat, VAST Data, WekaIO, StorONE, Pliops, ScaleMP, even Anobit acquired by Apple in 2012 or Weebit, even and few ones are missing.
2020 will be interesting to watch in file storage with FlashBlade from Pure Storage, Qumulo, WekaIO and VAST Data.
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