Vast Data Inc., an infrastructure startup funded by Dell Technologies Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., today unveiled a new version of its storage platform that promises to enable faster processing speeds for machine learning models.

New York-based Vast Data is challenging the conventions of how enterprises manage their information. Normally, a storage system has the dual role of safekeeping records and performing low-level data operations such as compression. The startup’s Universal Storage platform separates these two responsibilities, outsourcing compression and other processor-heavy tasks outside the storage system to a discrete cluster of servers that can do the work faster.

The result, according to Vast Data, is a big jump in efficiency. The startup claims its platform can replace the mishmash of different storage systems on which enterprises store their data and in the process simplify maintenance, as well as lower costs. 

The newly introduced Universal Storage 2.0 release aims to accentuate these benefits for companies running machine learning workloads. Vast Data has added support for RDMA, a network technology widely used in supercomputers that acts as a kind of data shortcut. It allows a server to access the records sitting on a storage system directly without routing requests through the system’s operating system and processor, which speeds up the task considerably.

Vast Data claims that the RDMA support is already being tested by an unnamed customer in the auto industry. According to the startup, the carmaker hooked up artificial intelligence servers to its deployment and saw the machines start ingesting data at a rate of over 20 gigabytes per second, more than twice the top speed it managed to achieve before.

Unified Storage 2.0 also adds two other new features. The first is an improved snapshotting feature that enables companies to make copies of their data using less storage capacity, while the other addition is support for what the startup calls asymmetric cluster expansion. This latter enhancement lets enterprises install a wider variety of hardware when they need to add extra capacity or processing power to their Unified Storage deployments.

Vast Data’s value proposition is resonating with chief information officers. In the roughly six months since launching Unified Storage, the startup claims to have inked deals with “dozens” of organizations that currently have more than 50 petabytes of capacity provisioned on the platform. 

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