ASI Solutions in Australia and New Zealand has signed up to harness VAST Data’s platform to customers directly and as a managed service.
ASI works with a range of universities, councils, enterprises, and more across the region. The company was seeking a more modern data platform to support rising demand from its customers to support artificial intelligence workloads and improve their cyber resiliency in case of a ransomware attack.
To meet this demand, the company selected the VAST Data Platform – which unifies storage, database, and containerised compute engine services into a single, scalable software platform architected from the ground up to power AI and GPU-accelerated tools in modern data centres and clouds.
The platform uniquely enables organisations to understand all data, both structured and unstructured as it exists in the natural world, to generate superior insights and unlock new value.
Also, VAST said the platform has become the architecture of choice for efficiently feeding AI graphics processing units (GPU) and to power market-disrupting burgeoning AI clouds across the globe.
ASI itself is using VAST’s platform to provide modern, cost-effective offerings for its customers as a service, including smaller organisations that typically can’t access the economies-of-scale benefits enjoyed by larger enterprises.
The software firm has been able to halve the costs typically incurred from major cloud providers and help pave the way for customers to obtain cyber insurance through data immutability.
“The VAST Data Platform offers enterprise features like data immutability that ensure an organisation’s data is secure and compliant by preventing the accidental or malicious deletion and modification of data,” said Lloyd Vickery, ASI country manager in New Zealand.
“Increasingly, we’re seeing cyber insurance companies mandate this capability to provide cover, but it’s difficult and costly doing it through a hyperscaler,” said Vickery. “VAST’s platform is also built into our local secure data centres, so the data sovereignty aspect is covered too.”
Further, ASI sees significant benefits in the capabilities of the VAST;s DataBase, as it can run Python – a popular programming language for AI and machine learning (ML) workloads – directly on the architecture itself, which can give organisations more insights on their data as they develop AI pipelines and applications.
The latest version of VAST DataBase also supports the release of new functionality such as projections and minimising the amount of data needed to transmit across the network or read from storage, which allows the system to dramatically reduce query times and accelerate time to insight.
“ASI needed a modern, multi-protocol data platform to not only underpin data protection but deliver for other mission critical workloads,” said Sunil Chavan, VAST Data VP in the Asia-Pacific region and Japan.
“VAST Data’s all-flash performance, ransomware protection, similarity data reduction, and white glove support deliver a superior business outcome,” he added.
