VAST, NVIDIA, and Krystal Partner To Create “Katapult”, The Uk’s Homegrown Hypercloud
Overview
In 2002, frustrated by poor service and bad business practices, Simon Blackler launched Krystal Hosting to deliver a refreshing alternative to the large, faceless hosting corporations that dominate the market. Over the past 18 years, their honest, reliable, and personal approach to business has won them a loyal customer following and a reputation for excellence. Krystal has big ambitions and is now taking their unique approach to business to the Public Cloud providers with their new service, Katapult.
“Katapult is ‘Master-Crafted Virtual Infrastructure’,” says Simon; “we’ve cherry-picked the very best components, lovingly stitched them together, then made billing simple to understand.” To compete with the faceless Public Cloud giants, the team realised they’d need to be able to out-innovate some of the wealthiest organisations on earth, no small task.
Katapult’s no-compromise mantra demanded all-flash performance with linear and near-infinite scalability to support customer growth. Crucially, Katapult would need a file storage solution that could beat the cost per TB of the incumbent cloud providers who enjoy massive economies of scale.
Background
VAST Data Platform, based on the revolutionary DASE (Disaggregated, Shared Everything) architecture, was the only solution that could satisfy Katapult’s exact requirements for performance, scale, cost, and manageability.
Where current cloud file services offer limited performance, especially for small file systems, Katapult Files, based on the all-flash VAST Data Platform with the fully automated, non-blocking NVIDIA networking, provides consistently high performance at an even lower price. That low price is the result of VAST’s global management of QLC flash, similarity-based data reduction, and locally decodable erasure coding which combines to allow Katapult to sell this premium service for less than the other hyperscalers charge for disk storage.
As Alex Easter, Katapult’s CTO so succinctly put it, “Storage should be simple and VAST is incredibly simple.” VAST provides a single namespace for many tenants’ shared files via NFS and persistent volumes for containers using VAST’s Kubernetes CSI plugin. All managed via a modern web GUI and integrated into the Katapult’s provisioning and monitoring orchestration using a REST API.
Outcome
The combination of VAST’s revolutionary flash economics and NVIDIA’s fast and automated networking enables Katapult to affordably build an all-flash, high speed, low latency cloud platform that helps differentiate them from the competition.
VAST’s DASE architecture also provides a single storage cluster that scales performance and capacity independently, and provides dedicated QoS for both Krystal and Katapult clients. Deduplication works across the cluster, providing significant space savings.
“VAST is the only way we can compete with AWS’ Elastic File System. It’s our sling in this David vs. Goliath match up.”
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