Comments on: The Vast Potential For Storage In A Compute Crazed AI World https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/12/13/the-vast-potential-for-storage-in-a-compute-crazed-ai-world/ In-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds. Wed, 03 Jan 2024 20:43:47 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 By: Slim Albert https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/12/13/the-vast-potential-for-storage-in-a-compute-crazed-ai-world/#comment-217561 Thu, 14 Dec 2023 16:33:54 +0000 https://www.nextplatform.com/?p=143389#comment-217561 I do wish Vast Data all the success in the world, especially seeing how they’ve reached Series E, suggesting that they’re pretty much ready for the big time. But I do also have a couple of mild “concerns” (if one might call them that).

In the “copy 200 petabytes” example, I’m not sure if Denworth is suggesting that “local storage on the node” is a bad thing, or mainly that it’s ok if one has “ten NICs on that machine” at the ready to handle the situation. This because LLNL’s Rabbit experiment (de Supinski) seems to find that “a baby dedicated flash array for a pod of El Capitan nodes”, “converged into a […] PCI-Express network”, as a kind of “disaggregated and converged” relatively local storage subsystem, is useful (TNP’s “ideas for exascale storage” piece). Both Denworth and de Supinski could be right of course, depending on specifics of the workload beeing executed, and the flexibility of the data transport system in terms of conduit-type management (PCIe/CXL, ethernet, infiniband, …) (I guess?).

Also, at some point, both Aurora’s DAOS (Intel’s Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage), and Vast’s Universal Storage, were going to rely on 3D XPoint and/or Optane for some aspect of their system’s architecture. It is not entirely clear what is now replacing that tech in Aurora and in Vast’s system (was there really a need for it in the first place?), and/or how these systems were re-architected (if at all) to make up for the discontinuation of these products.

Irrespective though, yes, as Goldstone puts it (3rd link: “Blazing the trail”) “VAST Data […] uses the standard NFS client that’s part of Linux [and] on the backend […] It’s a scale out architecture [with] lots of innovative features” … in other words a winning product. Well done (IMHO)!

]]>