Vast Data Inc., an emerging data center storage provider backed by Dell Technologies Inc., today announced that it has secured $100 million in funding at a $1.2 billion valuation. 

The startup previously raised $80 million across three rounds. Renen Hallak, the startup’s chief executive officer, said Vast Data still had $40 million left over from its original war chest before raising this latest investment.

Vast Data exited stealth mode last year with a data center storage platform that it claims can replace all of a company’s existing flash and disk systems. The  startup says the platform, Universal Storage, can accommodate up to multiple petabytes of data per deployment.

A traditional flash or disk array has the dual role of storing data and performing low-level operations such as compressing that data. With Universal Storage, Vast Data has split these responsibilities between two separate components. Flash storage modules hold the information while the computationally intensive data operations are handled by a cluster of servers that can carry out the processing faster than a typical array.

This disaggregated architecture allows storage and compute capacity to be added separately, which is what provides the scalability that enables the platform to support petabyte-scale deployments. The startup ships the hardware with homegrown management software that provides various efficiency-boosting features. Universal Storage can reduce the amount of capacity records take up by as much as 90%, according to Vast Data, while the integrity of those records is maintained with the help of a data protection technology touted as over 10 times more efficient than standard methods.

Vast Data’s data protection algorithms  “bring the ‘tax’ of protecting from drive failures from 40% (average of other vendors) to only 2.5%,” co-founder and Vice President of Products Jeff Denworth told SiliconANGLE.

Denworth also went into detail about the technology the startup uses to cut the capacity requirements of records, describing it as “a new approach to data reduction that is neither compression nor deduplication.” Instead, he said, Vast Data’s approach combines elements from both.

“Our approach is global across all of your files, like with block-based deduplication, but the pattern matching is byte-granular in ways that customers only ever enjoyed with local compression,” Denworth added. “This innovation makes it possible to dramatically shrink the footprint and expense of modern file and object data … and has proven to even further reduce data that has already been compressed by applications.”

Vast Data’s pitch has managed to win over quite a few information technology teams. Since unveiling its platform last year, the startup reports to have closed “dozens” of deals averaging more than a million dollars with customers including Harvard Medical School, hedge funds and Fortune 500 companies. It claims sales in the first 12 months after Universal Storage’s debut exceeded the first-year sales of publicly traded Pure Storage Inc. and other major players in the storage market. 

Vast Data plans to use the new funding to bolster its headcount with a goal of adding more than 100 employees this year. The startup’s $100 million round included contributions from Dell, Mellanox Technologies Ltd., Goldman Sachs Inc. and Siemens AG’s Next47 venture capital arm, which led the investment. Commonfund Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, 83North and Greenfield Partners chipped in as well. 

Photo: Unsplash