Strategic PartnersIssue 042 records
VAST Data
Data infrastructure (limited SLED relevance): a VAST blog dated October 30 models its Kafka-compatible Event Broker on VAST on Cloud at $238,387 a month against $1.1 million for Confluent Cloud Enterprise at 4 GB/s with five-day retention. It is a vendor model with no customers named, and VAST concedes long retention can cost more. An earlier independent StorageMath analysis says VAST's Event Broker and uptime claims lack the methods needed to check them. No new U.S. state, local or education VAST deployment surfaced, and the CSCS evaluation remains inaccessible.
- Evidence records
- 2
- Cross-source patterns
- 1
- Evidence classes
- 1 vendor claim1 independent research
- Outcomes
- 1 emerging1 cautionary
- Source freshness
- 1 new this fortnight1 older, newly relevant
- Research completed
- 2026-11-03
Choose a role to see its takeaway beside every record in the ledger.
Patterns across the evidence
Synthesis · Lighthouse Advisory interpretation
VAST Event Broker cost and performance claims rest on vendor-only models; public buyers need their own workload baselines
VAST's October 30 TCO blog models a 4-5x monthly cost advantage over Confluent Cloud Enterprise for one 4 GB/s scenario, and concedes long retention can cost more. StorageMath's earlier analysis argues VAST's Event Broker performance and uptime claims omit the configuration and durability details needed to verify them. Interpretation: state, local and campus buyers should treat both cost and performance figures as hypotheses and test them with their own throughput, retention, fanout, durability settings and negotiated prices.
Operating questionBefore an agency or university considers VAST Event Broker for telemetry or log streams, what measured workload profile, matched durability settings and contract pricing will it use to test VAST's cost and performance claims?
Supporting evidenceVAST DataStorageMath (independent storage-claims analysis site; authors not named)
Evidence ledger
Full record · every source keeps its link and limitations
VAST models VAST on Cloud Event Broker at $238,387 a month versus $1.1 million for Confluent Cloud Enterprise at 4 GB/s, and concedes long retention can cost more
VAST's own TCO model prices a Kafka-compatible VAST Event Broker running on VAST on Cloud virtual EBoxes against Confluent Cloud Enterprise list pricing (October 2026) for a 4 GB/s, 2:1 fanout, five-day-retention workload: $238,387 versus $1,106,530 per month ($23.78 versus $110.38 per TB ingested). The gap is attributed to Confluent's per-GB ingress/egress and post-replication storage fees versus erasure coding with 2.7% to 20% parity overhead. VAST concedes long retention on flash EBoxes can cost more than archive-tier cloud offerings and says value is greatest for 1 to 14 days. Full-AZ recovery takes 3 to 15 minutes, with data lazy-loaded from object storage.
Why it matters, evidence and limitations
- Why it matters
- Limited and indirect. No government or education customer is named. State and local agencies and universities that stream high-volume telemetry (traffic and transit sensors, public-safety video metadata, security logs, research instruments) could use the model as a template for their own comparisons. Most SLED streaming workloads are far below 4 GB/s, where the modeled gap is smaller and fixed provisioned costs matter more.
- Evidence and measured results
- Vendor-authored cost model, not a measured deployment. It uses one workload profile and list pricing (low end of the regional range); the Confluent figure is described as a floor because three Enterprise clusters are pooled. No performance, latency or reliability measurements are reported, and no customer bill is shown. A Hanging Context summary published 2026-11-01 00:58 UTC repeats the figures and labels them self-reported.
- Limitations and uncertainty
- Vendor claim. Single modeled scenario; no independent reproduction; publication date ambiguous (metadata Oct 30, byline Nov 3). Event Broker performance claims have previously been criticized for missing methodology (see StorageMath item). Treat savings as a hypothesis to test, not an expected outcome.
StorageMath argues VAST's 99.9991% uptime and 10x-over-Kafka Event Broker claims lack the methodology needed for verification
StorageMath examines VAST's claimed 99.9991% measured uptime (about 4.7 minutes a year) and Event Broker claims of a 10x+ advantage over Kafka on like-for-like hardware, later stated as 604% more throughput. It argues neither claim can be verified because VAST has not published definitions of downtime, sample size, exclusions, hardware and configuration, replication and acks settings, latency distributions, or reproducible scripts. It concludes the claims should be treated as marketing until methodology is published, while allowing the Event Broker may genuinely be faster.
Why it matters, evidence and limitations
- Why it matters
- Newly relevant because VAST's October 30 TCO blog extends the same Event Broker into a cost argument for cloud streaming. Public buyers evaluating VAST for state, local or campus data platforms can use this checklist of missing details to write evaluation criteria and demand reproducible evidence.
- Evidence and measured results
- Analytical commentary using arithmetic on the vendor's published figures; no new measurements, tests or customer data. Authors and funding are not disclosed; the site states it analyzes all vendors with equal scrutiny. It critiques performance and uptime claims, not the October 2026 TCO model specifically.
- Limitations and uncertainty
- Ten months old and polemical in tone; anonymous authorship; no independent test data. It references 2025 claims as reported by Blocks and Files; VAST may since have published more methodology (VAST's OpenMessaging test blogs were seen in search results but not inspected for this edition).
How to read this edition
Source findings, measured results and limitations come from the cited publications. Patterns, operating questions, role takeaways and implementation considerations are Lighthouse Advisory interpretation, stated as questions to validate locally rather than guaranteed outcomes. Vendor and operator claims are labeled as claims. Full research method.
- Vendor claim
- A supplier-provided assertion that has not been upgraded to independent evidence.
- Independent research
- Research conducted outside the implementing organization.