VAST Data today announced it has signed a deal with ASI Solutions to provide VAST’s data platform to customers directly and as a managed service.

ASI is one of Australia and New Zealand’s (A/NZ) leading information and communication technology (ICT) partners, working 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 AI 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 – and 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.

The University of Auckland is using the VAST Data Platform to bolster its ransomware resiliency and ensure operational data can be quickly reinjected into the University in just hours in the event of a ransomware attack. It also praised the platform’s support of its sustainability strategy; VAST’s systems are designed to last at least a decade, which means the University can reduce the e-waste caused by replacing hardware. Further, VAST’s architecture and similarity data reduction capabilities drive sustainable data management practices.

In addition, Timaru District Council is using the VAST Data Platform to improve its operations by consolidating its environment and efficiently broadening access to its current business critical data as well as its archived data.

ASI itself is also 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. ASI 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.
“Increasingly, we’re seeing cyber insurance companies mandate this capability to provide cover, but it’s difficult and costly doing it through a hyperscaler. VAST’s platform is also built into our local secure data centres, so the data sovereignty aspect is covered too.”

ASI also 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. VAST Data’s all-flash performance, ransomware protection, similarity data reduction, and white glove support deliver a superior business outcome,” said Sunil Chavan, Vice President Asia Pacific and Japan, VAST Data.
“The notion of data tiering to sub-optimal environments is obsolete and endemic to a broken data strategy. As organisations continue to expand their data sets and further explore AI and deep learning initiatives, they will require a data platform able to scale with them.”