The extended partnership with Commvault follows up a major one with HPE early last year.
Phil Manez, VP, Global HPE GTM for VAST Data
A year ago, data platform vendor VAST Data and HPE announced a major partnership, through which VAST Data’s file software platform was being into a new HPE GreenLake for File Storage service. This year, at last week’s HPE Discover event, VAST Data and HPE did not announce a similar extension of their their strategic relationship. VAST did, however, launch a significant expansion of their partnership with data protection vendor Commvault.
The announcement sees the integration of the Commvault enterprise-class data protection software suite with the VAST Data Platform, in order to deliver a co-engineered solution for the needs of the ransomware era.
“With Commvault, we are partnered with a mature offering that can backup to anything,” said . “You need a mature software platform for backup for effective ransomware recovery, providing immutability and restoring a huge amount of data from backup to production. As long as that takes to do that, you’re not in business.”
The joint solution combines Commvault’s technology with the scale and performance of the VAST Data Platform, to provide a robust and highly scalable solution designed to help enterprise customers return to business following a data loss event like a ransomware attack.
“We have the horsepower and modern technology to do that in a way that’s cost effective,” Manez indicated.
The integration architects Commvault’s platform to take advantage of VAST’s all-flash read performance, to safeguard data wherever it is, across clouds, data centers, SaaS apps, containers, and the edge. Combining Commvault deduplication and compression with VAST’s Similarity-based data reduction, provides network bandwidth reduction and superior storage savings to offer a cost point equivalent to HDD-based backup appliances, but with over one hundred times better restore performance.
VAST and Commvault also publicly announced that they are enabling service provider Expedient in a design which will be tantamount to the full joint solution the two companies will make available later this year. It will enable Expedient to drive an industry-leading SLA to their customers, with great operational efficiency and optimal pricing. Expedient has seen up to an additional 2:1 data reduction since moving to VAST’s data platform, on top of Commvault’s front-end deduplication.
The companies are emphasizing that the extension of the partnership is a major plus for their channel partners.
“This announcement signifies that VAST is doubling down on our strategic alliance with Commvault and is great news for our collective partner ecosystem,” said Gregg Machon, Vice President, Worldwide Channels at VAST Data. “This new co-engineered, validated design is a meet-in-the-channel initiative and will help our partners to deliver more tightly integrated, scalable data protection solutions that enable instant recovery and drive greater operational efficiency and performance to their customers, as seen already with Expedient.”
VAST and Commvault’s forthcoming engineered systems will be available in Fall 2023.
Last year’s partnership with HPE saw the VAST file system become the guts of a new HPE GreenLake service
Manez, who was actually VAST’s first channel employee when he joined the company, in February 2020 – first channel employee VP, Global HPE GTM for VAST, emphasized the important of the HPE partnership around GreenLake as well.
“It’s a unique partnership, in which Vast Data is not part of either HPE Complete or HPE Pathfinder,” he said. “We are bringing a first party product, and we are the file systems under the covers. It’s a compete product, not a reference architecture.
“We met each other around a very large Isilon customer that was looking to evolve around data analytics,” Manez noted. “Dell was had been providing their whole solution. But we won the storage part from Dell, and HPE won the compute. The customer said that we should work together. There have been enterprise NAS and high performance compute, and no one did both well, but we do. As the two converge increasingly, storage becomes a massive bottleneck in AI. We have a platform that supports enterprise storage and HPC. This is something that didn’t used to matter because they lived in different worlds.”
These partnerships will help VAST in Canada, Manez stressed.
“VAST really entered the Canadian market last year,” he said. “It really has driven our relationship with HPE in Canada.”
