Storage: very important for Roman emperors, Jensen Huang, commodity manipulators, George Carlin and yours truly.
From The Next Platform:
....MUCH MOREWhen it comes to funding rounds for high tech companies, the alphabet usually runs out somewhere around Series E. If you haven’t figured out who you are by then – or the market hasn’t – that probably means the you are going to be one of the 80 percent or so of companies that don’t make it and not one of the 20 percent that either cashes out in a sale to a bigger firm, to a venture capitalist, or through an initial public offering down on Wall Street.
If we had to make a bet – and we can’t because we don’t invest in the companies that we write about – we would bet that Vast Data, which has made flash storage and the NFS protocol work well and scale far and which has blurred the lines between storage and databases more recently, will not only be one of the 20 percent of startups that make it, but will be one of the blockbuster IPOs of 2024 – or perhaps 2025 if the global economy goes up on the rocks.
Modern high performance, scale-out workloads need a new kind of storage, one that can work well with HPC simulation and modeling as well as AI training, and that is what the Vast Data Platform, the most recent iteration of the storage created by Vast Data, is all about. And with Vast Data raising another $118 million in its Series E financing round, bringing the company to $381 million in total funding and giving it a valuation of $9.1 billion according to co-founder Jeff Denworth, up 2.5X in the past two years, Vast Data could be one of the breakout IPOs next year as it has already become a go-to storage platform for large scale infrastructure.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was a big and early customer of Vast Data, and this is not surprising since some of the company’s founders were instrumental in the creation of the Lustre parallel file system that cut its teeth at this flagship US Department of Energy HPC center. Since then, the Texas Advanced Computing Center is employing Vast Data for a scratch file system on the “Stampede 3” supercomputer, and AI cloud builders CoreWeave, G42, and Lambda have also tapped Vast Data to provide the back-end storage for their GPU clusters.
This is in keeping with the philosophy that Denworth and co-founder Renen Hallack described to us way back in February 2019, when Vast Data dropped out of stealth, saying that unlike Nutanix, Pure Storage, and a bunch of prior storage startups, Vast Data was only going to focus on the needs of large-scale customers and chase big deals instead of lots of smaller ones because this was the fastest way to create and improve a product and to reach profitability. We look forward to seeing the S-1 filing that Vast Data makes when it goes public so we can see in its historical financial figures if this has truly played out as planned....
Attempting to take the elements of the intro almost in order:
"Storage: Very Important For Roman Emperors and Commodities Market Manipulators"
The Golden Age of Commodities Market Manipulation: Corners, Storage and Squeezes
These days however, to purloin that wealth, you don't even need to be dealing with storables:
How to Manipulate Non-storable Commodities Markets
Remember, the spectrum runs from storage to hoarding to market corners.
And corners in commodities refers to physical, you can't corner a commod by simply buying futures or forwards, you also have to take up the physical supply.
Conversely, squeezes are accomplished in the futures..
Moi: The fortuitous timing and incredible run of warehouse equities, 2019 - 2022:
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Buying Warehouses In Europe and China
It was rather lonely in 2019 when we were pitching warehouses and cold storage facilities but by December 2020 we were posting stuff like:
Real Estate: "Logistics market is hot, but is a bubble forming?"
It's always nice to see a sector you've been babbling about for a couple years finally referred to as a bubble.
And finally, Mr. Carlin:
