Data Backup Digest

Vexata has been in semi-stealth for around for years, but last month they came out with $54 million of funding from Mayfield, Redline Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Intel Capital. Not only that, but they showed off their flagship product: Active Data Fabric.

The Active Data Fabric is a software-defined all-solid-state data storage infrastructure. The aim is to enable transformative performance for tier 1 applications, either in the cloud or in enterprise setups, at scale.

Most business are heavily reliant on data nowadays. This is for a variety of reasons – partly due to the boom of the Internet of Things and services being provided through cloud systems. But also because enterprises have realised the value that a lot of their data brings for analytical purposes.

A survey carried out by IDC found that 76 percent of IT professionals think that slow data access has inhibited opportunities. Over half of the data they were extracting was five to seven days old. Those sorts of delays are unacceptable.

Vexata Active Data Fabric boasts exponentially higher performance and scale when compared to other all-flash solutions. This works by removing I/O bottlenecks, meaning platforms like Oracle, SAS, SQL Server and more can achieve their necessary performance when writing across large data sets, without application rewrites or infrastructure re-architecture.

How does it do this? The main reason is because of its storage operating system, named the VX-OS, which uses solid-state media like NVMe Flash and 3D XPoint SSDs. By using these, they can provide blazing fast speeds without putting resiliency or data management services at a disadvantage.

The operating system can be found in three different applications provided by Vexeta:

1. VX-100 Scalable Systems, which uses flash SSDs and Intel Optane SSDs, to offer power-efficient and modular storage systems. This is available now.

2. VX-Stack Appliances, which are pre-configured application-designed solutions for services like Oracle and SAS. These are available now.

3. VX-Cloud, allowing the operating system to run off standard services to build a custom cloud infrastructure. This will be available in the future for public and private cloud data centres.

Zahid Hussain and Surya Varansai are the founders of their company. Their aim was to create a data infrastructure solution that provided simplicity, cost-effectiveness and met the I/O performance demands of digital businesses.

“With our Active Data Fabric solutions based on the ground-breaking VX-OS, our customers are seeing immediate and dramatic business benefits,” said Hussain.

The benefits from all Vexata’s offerings include low latency capabilities, improved I/O performance, plug and play deployment, and payment on growth.

“Vexata helps enterprises accelerate mission- and business-critical applications by dramatically reducing storage latency,” said Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “ESG Lab tested the technology using a punishing mix of OLTP and data analytics against the same data set in the same storage system and Vexata supported more than 8 million transactions per minute and 22 gigabytes per second of throughput at sub-100µsec response times.”

The patent is still pending on Vexata’s technology, but with huge amounts of venture capital behind them they are sure to make a strong push into the data market.