🚀 Recap and recording link from this week's Customer Training Webinar on "What's New In The VAST Management System"!

Education
1

What’s New In VAST 5.3 and upcoming in 5.4

We recently hosted a comprehensive training webinar focused on the latest features available in VAST 5.3 and previewed upcoming capabilities in VAST 5.4. Led by Phil Wagstrom from the Office of the CTO and Tomer Hagay from our product team, this session provided valuable insights for VAST Data administrators looking to leverage new capabilities immediately.

Watch the webinar recording here!

VAST 5.3: Major Enhancements Now Available

Enhanced Multi-Tenancy Administration

One of the most significant updates in VAST 5.3 centers around multi-tenancy enhancements that provide better separation and control between cluster administrators and tenant administrators.

Key Improvements:

  • Capacity Controls: Cluster administrators can now set hard and soft limits on tenant storage consumption that tenant admins cannot modify
  • Tenant Privacy Mode: A cluster-wide option that hides tenant views and policies from cluster administrators for enhanced security
  • Separate Management Interfaces: Distinct login URLs and dashboards for tenant admins vs. cluster admins
  • New Tenants Dashboard: Provides cluster administrators with high-level performance metrics across all tenants

Administration Separation:

  • Cluster Admins: Maintain control over hardware configuration, VIP pools, replication peers, and cluster-wide resources
  • Tenant Admins: Can create views, quotas, lifecycle rules, local users, and manage replication - but only within their tenant scope

The new tenant administration includes dedicated login URLs, capacity monitoring (shown in logical space only), and full API support through the VAST Python SDK with tenant-specific commands.

Block Protocol Support (NVMe over TCP)

VAST 5.3 introduces block storage capabilities as a first-class protocol alongside existing file and object protocols.

Key Features:

  • Protocol: NVMe over TCP (not iSCSI or Fibre Channel)
  • Use Cases: Boot from SAN, ESX VMFS support, storage consolidation
  • Compatibility:
    • Linux kernels (Red Hat 8/9, Ubuntu 22.04+)
    • VMware ESX 7.0+
    • Windows (requires external driver)

Configuration Process:

  1. Create a view with subsystem name
  2. Create volumes with specified sizes
  3. Define hosts using NQN identifiers
  4. Configure mappings between hosts and volumes

The block protocol leverages VAST’s multi-pathing capabilities and presents volumes across all available VIPs in the pool.

Kafka Support (VAST Data Engine Event Broker)

VAST 5.3 introduces native Kafka support for real-time messaging and data pipeline orchestration.

Architecture Benefits:

  • Simplified Management: No separate brokers, Zookeeper, or replication complexity
  • VAST Database Storage: Topics stored in element store with automatic redundancy
  • Scalability: Automatically scales with C-node additions
  • Data Reduction: Benefits from VAST’s compression and deduplication

Implementation:

  • 100% in-house development (not open-source based)
  • API-compatible with standard Kafka
  • Requires dedicated VIP pool (one Kafka instance per VIP pool)
  • Supports produce/consume APIs, consumer groups, and database queries

Current Limitations:

  • Plain text authentication only (encryption coming later)
  • External clients only (internal consumption features planned)

VAST 5.4: Coming Soon

Massive Metadata Scaling

VAST 5.4 will deliver a 5x increase in file count capacity per D-box through metadata architecture improvements.

Scaling Example:

  • Ceres 338: Up from 2 billion to 10 billion files per 300TB

This enhancement addresses use cases requiring extremely large numbers of small files per unit.

Enhanced Data Space Capabilities

The upcoming release combines Global Namespace and Async Replication for the first time, enabling:

  • Active-active namespace across multiple clusters
  • Simultaneous data protection and availability
  • Flexible DR configurations with active workload capabilities

Data Engine (Serverless Functions)

VAST 5.4 introduces native serverless computing within the cluster:

  • Event-driven: Functions triggered by file system events
  • Python Support: Create custom Python scripts for data processing
  • Pipeline Creation: Build sophisticated data processing workflows
  • Open Framework: Not limited to AI workloads - supports any custom processing needs

Key Takeaways

  1. Multi-tenancy enhancements provide true administrative separation while maintaining operational flexibility
  2. Block protocol support enables full storage consolidation on VAST platforms
  3. Kafka integration simplifies real-time data pipeline architecture
  4. 5.4 roadmap promises massive scaling improvements and native compute capabilities
  5. Zero-downtime upgrades make adopting new features operationally seamless

These enhancements position VAST as a comprehensive data platform capable of handling diverse workloads while simplifying infrastructure management. The combination of enhanced multi-tenancy, new protocol support, and upcoming serverless capabilities creates opportunities for significant operational efficiency gains.

For detailed implementation guidance and upgrade planning, we recommend consulting with your VAST Customer Success Engineer to ensure optimal deployment strategies for your specific environment.

1 Like