We all want to, so why can’t we kick the hard-drive habit? It’s not today’s data-analytics and artificial-intelligence workloads. They call for the fastest flash storage available. We’re still using sluggish HDDs for their modest pricing. So what happens when flash is priced equal to HDD? HDDs go on display in the museum, companies are finally able to do AI at scale and, strangely enough, they use more tape. 

This is according to Renen Hallak (pictured, left), founder and chief executive officer of Vast Data Inc. Since its founding five years ago, Vast has been on a mission to kill HDDs, according to Hallak. The challenge to accomplishing this — and its solution —  are simple: “To kill HDD, you need to get price parity; flash and hard drives are not at price parity today,” he stated. 

Hallak, along with David Floyer (pictured, right), co-founder and chief technology officer of Wikibon Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the growing demand for affordable flash and how companies are leveraging Vast’s innovative storage architecture for advanced workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

QLC, 3D Xpoint & RDMA make fast friends

No one doubts that flash performs better than HDD in everything except price, according to Hallak. In fact, non-flash architectures often simply can’t handle data-intensive AI workloads, he said. 

Is it possible to build a new architecture that chews through workloads like high-end flash without breaking the bank? Vast gathered together low-cost flash — namely quad-level cell, or QLC — and some performance enhancers to find out. The result, Hallak said, is all-flash storage with a price-to-performance ratio that will make HDDs obsolete. 

QLC flash’s low per-gigabyte cost and high capacity made it an easy choice for Vast. On most measures; it’s as good as more expensive options, according to Hallak. “The only difference between high-cost and low-cost flash today is in write cycles and in write performance,” he said.

Vast introduced 3D Xpoint non-volitile memory technology to offset both of those deficiencies. Developed by Intel Corp. and Micron Technology Inc., 3D Xpoint (pronounced three dee cross point) acts as a large write buffer and a high-capacity metadata store in Vast’s system. This allows Vast to arrange information in a large persistent write buffer before placing it on the low-cost flash.

“It also allows us to develop new types of metadata structures and algorithms that allow us to make better use of the low-cost flash and reduce the effective price down even lower than the raw capacity,” Hallak explained. 

For network attached storage, Vast leverages remote direct memory access from Mellanox Technologies Ltd. for another low-cost performance jump. “By using RDMA for NAS, you’re able, if you need to, to get down, in microseconds, to the data. Overall, that’s a thousand times faster than any HDD system could manage,” Floyer noted. 

The HDD-free future

The emerging price-to-performance reality means practically everyone will start opting for all-flash, Hallak said. “Cooler” data that need not be accessed often will find it’s way onto tape rather than HDDs, he explained.

Vast began selling two years ago and just hit $150 million run rate, according to Hallak. It has customers in science research, medical imaging, genomics, hedgefunds, autonomous vehicles and animation. 

These customers have AI and deep-learning workloads that must access the entirety of the data and read it over and over for insights. Super-fast data access and processing requires storage media like flash, according to Hallak.

“Once you have that, you have the foundation to step into this next-generation type work where you can actually make money off of your information,” he concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Vast Data Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Vast Data nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE