With Vast Data, Nvidia is in the company of a storage unicorn

When it was announced in May of 2021 that Nvidia had increased its investment in storage startup Vast Data, it was not exactly clear how or if the companies already were working together. 

In any event, you couldn’t blame the semiconductor giant for getting a good grip on the tail of a unicorn with a $3.7 billion valuation.

Now, almost a year later, more aspects of the relationship are becoming clear. The companies announced a few weeks ago during Nvidia’s GTC Spring event that Nvidia Bluefield DPUs are powering Israel-based Vast Data’s new Ceres storage platform. Ceres is aimed at redefining data center storage for the AI era by leveraging not only the Bluefield DPUs, but also emerging ruler-based hyperscale flash drives that improve performance, simplify serviceability and reduce data center costs.

A statement from the companies described in further detail what can be gained through this combination: "Leveraging new Nvidia BlueField technology, which combines network and NVMe device management services into a low-power Arm-based SoC, DPUs make it possible to build NVMe enclosures without the need for large and power-hungry x86 processors. Transitioning NVMe-over-Fabric (NVMeoF) services from x86 servers to Nvidia BlueField DPUs makes it possible to achieve a 1U form factor capable of delivering over 60 GBps of performance per enclosure for data-intensive applications, all while consuming significantly less power. VAST’s DASE architecture is uniquely positioned to leverage DPU-based systems by decoupling storage processing from the flash layer."

Jeff Denworth, co-founder and CMO at Vast Data, recently told Fierce Electronics that the new Ceres platform is now in the process of being certified to work with the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD architecture, which was designed specifically for some of the largest-scale enterprise AI workloads. Ceres will help enterprise quickly and flexibly scale their storage for AI training infrastructure to “exabytes of data,” he said.

“I think we’re mutually interested in seeing AI become adopted very widely across the enterprise,” he said.

The bridge between that mutual interest is Mellanox, another Israel-based firm that Nvidia acquired in early 2020, and which itself also invested in Vast Data in 2020 and again in 2021. 

“We worked with Mellanox, and that basically allowed us to open a door with a larger organization in Nvidia as Mellanox got acquired,” Denworth said. “That essentially started a conversation about enterprise AI and since that time… Vast and Nvidia have been quite close on a number of topics. For example, we developed a technology with Nvidia called GPU direct storage.”

Last year, Nvidia and Vast worked on another reference design that used VAST Data’s LightSpeed all-flash storage system, four Nvidia DGX™ A100 systems, and Mellanox Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum Ethernet switches.

Denworth also said the companies are working on a development project having to do with Zero Trust access to data storage. “There are a number of different channels where we are working with them,” he said, adding, “And we have a very robust hardware partnership with them now, thanks to this Bluefield effort.”

Vast Data Universal Storage certification for the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD is slated for availability in the third quarter of this year. Initially Vast is using the first-generation Bluefield DPUs, but in the future may skip a generation to employ the recently unveiled Bluefield-3 DPU architecture.

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