VAST Data - Experts & Thought Leaders

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announced the availability of VAST Foundation Stacks, a new open source library that augments and extends NVIDIA AI Blueprints into production-ready pipeline implementations that run natively on the VAST AI Operating System. NVIDIA AI Blueprints NVIDIA AI Blueprints provide developers with a foundational starting point for building advanced AI applications and intelligent agents, leveraging NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to rapidly prototype, customise, and deploy domain-specific AI workflows with minimal integration effort. VAST Foundation stacks extend these blueprints into production-ready templates, enabling organisations to deploy and operate NVIDIA-powered pipelines natively on the VAST AI Operating System. Developers can now focus on the business logic that connects AI to their environment instead of assembling the underlying infrastructure and platform layers required to support it, enabling teams to deliver AI applications faster. Enterprises are racing to operationalise proven AI patterns, but many reference examples still require extensive integration before they can run securely and reliably in production. Teams often must stitch together fragmented infrastructure, orchestration layers and data services to make these AI applications production-ready. VAST AI operating system VAST Foundation stacks address this challenge by extending NVIDIA AI Blueprints into repeatable, enterprise-ready implementations designed to run natively on the VAST AI operating system. By unifying data access, database services, compute orchestration, eventing, and pipeline execution in a single environment, VAST enables organisations to deploy scalable AI pipelines without building complex infrastructure from scratch.  These Foundation stacks can be seamlessly and repeatedly deployed anywhere the VAST AI OS runs, including in the cloud as well as on-premises via VAST's newly announced CNode-X platforms, as part of the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.  Foundations stacks The first Foundation Stacks are based on NVIDIA AI Blueprints for Video Search and Summarisation (VSS) and NVIDIA AI-Q: The VSS-based VAST Foundation stack enables organisations to ingest massive volumes of live or archived video and extract insights through semantic indexing, summarisation, and interactive Q&A, powered by the high-performance data and pipeline services of the VAST AI Operating System.  The AI-Q based VAST Foundation stack provides a foundation for building custom AI researchers that can operate across private, enterprise data sources, synthesising hours of research in minutes while leveraging the VAST AI OS for persistent and secure context, scalable reasoning pipelines, and trusted agent execution. Expert insights “NVIDIA AI Blueprints have given the market an important starting point for building next-generation applications, but enterprises still need a production-ready way to deploy and operate those capabilities at scale,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “With VAST Foundation Stacks, VAST is taking the architectural patterns behind leading NVIDIA Blueprints and giving customers a faster path from experimentation to production for scalable AI pipelines, video intelligence, and agentic AI systems.” “As enterprises transition to production AI at scale, preparing enterprise data for AI has become one of the biggest challenges,” said Adel El Hallak, Vice President, Product at NVIDIA. “Turning data into AI-ready pipelines needs to be done continuously and requires full-stack acceleration across compute, networking and software. By extending NVIDIA AI Blueprints with the VAST AI Operating System, customers can prepare and serve data so intelligent agents are always working off the most recent and accurate information.” Releasing stacks In addition to the available VSS and AI-Q implementations, VAST plans to release additional Foundation stacks in the coming months, including industry-focused examples.  VAST Foundation stacks will be available through a public GitHub repository, with interactive demos and planned sandbox environments for customers and partners.

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announced at Microsoft Ignite a collaboration with Microsoft to power the next wave of agentic AI. Available soon to Azure customers, the VAST AI OS provides a simple way to deploy high-performance, scalable AI infrastructure in the cloud. Enterprises will be able to access VAST’s complete suite of data services in Azure, including unified storage, data cataloging, and database capabilities to support complex AI workflows. This integration will enable organisations to manage data seamlessly across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, delivering the scale, intelligence, and automation required to accelerate AI innovation. VAST AI Operating System The VAST AI Operating System will run on Azure infrastructure, enabling customers to deploy and operate it using the same tools, governance, security, and billing frameworks they have become accustomed to. The solution will deliver unified management, consistent performance, and Azure-grade reliability. “This collaboration with Microsoft reflects our shared vision for the future of AI infrastructure, where performance, scale, and simplicity converge to enable enterprises to transform their business with agentic AI,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Becoming an Azure Partner represents the first milestone in that journey. Customers will be able to unify their data and AI pipelines across environments with the same power, simplicity, and performance they expect from VAST, now with the reach, elasticity, and reliability of Microsoft’s global cloud.” Advantages of the capabilities of the VAST AI OS Azure customers will be able to take full advantage of the capabilities of the VAST AI OS running on Azure, including: Built for Agentic AI: Leverage VAST InsightEngine and AgentEngine to run intelligent, data-driven workflows directly where data lives. InsightEngine delivers stateless, high-performance compute and database services that accelerate vector search, RAG pipelines, and data preparation. AgentEngine orchestrates autonomous agents operating on real-time data streams, enabling continuous AI reasoning across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Performance at Scale for Model Builders: Designed for the demands of model training and inference, VAST AI OS keeps Azure GPU and CPU clusters saturated with high-throughput data services, intelligent caching, and metadata-optimized I/O to ensure predictable performance from pilot to multi-region scale. VAST benefits from the latest Azure Infrastructure solutions including the Laos VM Series using Azure Boost Accelerated Networking. Seamless Hybrid AI Workflows: An exabyte-scale DataSpace creates a unified global namespace that eliminates data silos and enables effortless data mobility. Customers can instantly burst from on-premises to Azure for GPU-accelerated workloads without migration or reconfiguration. Unified Data Access: VAST’s DataStore supports file (NFS, SMB), object (S3), and block protocols, while the VAST DataBase combines transactional performance with the query speed of a warehouse and the economics of a data lake, allowing diverse workloads to run on one platform without compromise. Elastic, Cost-Efficient Architecture: VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) design enables independent scaling of compute and storage resources within Azure. Combined with built-in Similarity Reduction, the platform minimises storage footprint and reduces cost for large-scale AI infrastructure. Azure’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure “VAST’s AI Operating System running on Azure will give Azure customers a high-performance, scalable platform built on the Laos VM Series using Azure Boost that seamlessly extends on-premises AI pipelines into Azure’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure,” said Aung Oo, Vice President, Azure Storage at Microsoft. “Many AI model builders in the world leverage VAST for its scalability, breakthrough performance, and AI-native capabilities. This collaboration can help our mutual customers streamline operations, reduce costs, and accelerate time-to-insight for AI workloads of every size.” Future of AI infrastructure As Microsoft continues to invest in the future of AI infrastructure, including its own custom silicon initiatives, VAST will work closely with the Azure team to align on next-generation platform requirements. This collaboration positions VAST as a strategic element of Microsoft’s broader AI computing strategy, helping to unlock the full potential of emerging innovations in compute. Together, the companies will aim to ensure that future AI systems, regardless of the processor or model architecture, are fuelled by an AI operating system built for scale, performance, and simplicity.  Upcoming joint appearances Renen Hallak, VAST Data Founder and CEO, will be at Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco and available for joint customer meetings, to discuss how Azure and the VAST AI Operating System will enable enterprises to operationalise agentic AI at global scale. At Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis, VAST Data will host Andrew Jones, Engineering Leader, Future Supercomputing & AI Capabilities, on November 19 in a conversation exploring how Azure AI and modern data strategies are shaping the AI cloud. Register to join the breakfast session and be part of the discussion on the future of AI infrastructure. Representatives from both VAST and Microsoft will also deliver technical presentations and demos in their respective booths throughout the event. Learn more by visiting VAST Booth #3204 and Microsoft Booth #1627.

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, enabling customers to deploy the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS) as a fully managed service and extend a unified global namespace across hybrid environments. Powered by the VAST DataSpace, enterprises can seamlessly connect clusters running in Google Cloud and on-premises locations, eliminating complex migrations and making data instantly available wherever AI runs. Fragmented storage and siloed data pipelines Enterprises want to run AI where it performs best, but data rarely lives in one place and migrating can take months and costs millions. Fragmented storage and siloed data pipelines make it hard to feed the AI accelerators with consistent, high-throughput access and every environment change multiplies governance and compliance burdens. VAST DataSpace to connect clusters VAST and Google Cloud address this challenge by making data placement a choice rather than a constraint. In this recorded demonstration, VAST showcased the power of the VAST DataSpace to connect clusters across more than 10,000 kilometres, linking one in the United States with another in Japan. This configuration delivered seamless, near real-time access to the same data in both locations while running inference workloads with vLLM, enabling intelligent workload placement so organisations can run AI models on TPUs in the US and GPUs in Japan without duplicating data or managing separate environments. Fully managed AI OS “Through our partnership with Google Cloud, we’re meeting customers where they are by delivering a fully managed AI OS,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data.  “When leveraging our global namespace with intelligent streaming, Google Cloud customers can auto-deploy a VAST-managed cluster via Google Cloud Marketplace and start production in minutes, providing integrated governance and billing, elastic scale, and supporting the hybrid cloud mission – and it’s all handled by VAST, making enterprise data instantly usable for agentic workloads.” Digital transformation journeys “Bringing VAST AI Operating System to Google Cloud Marketplace will help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the data solution on Google Cloud's trusted, global infrastructure," said Nirav Mehta, Vice President, Compute Platform at Google Cloud.  “VAST can now securely scale and support customers on their digital transformation journeys.” Powering Google Cloud TPUs with data access and near-local version Recent performance results also show how the VAST AI Operating System connects seamlessly to Google Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) virtual machines, integrating directly with Google Cloud’s platform for large-scale AI. In testing with Meta’s Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model, the VAST AI Operating System delivered model load speeds on par with local NVMe disks, while maintaining predictable performance during cold starts. These results confirm that the VAST AI OS is not just a data platform but a performance engine designed to keep accelerators fully utilised and AI pipelines continuously in motion. Advanced platform features “The VAST AI OS is redefining what it means to move fast in AI. Loading models at speeds comparable to local NVMe while delivering a full suite of advanced platform features,” said Subramanian Kartik, Chief Scientist at VAST Data.  “This is the kind of acceleration that turns idle accelerators into active intelligence, driving higher efficiency and faster time to insight for every AI workload.” With VAST on Google Cloud, customers can benefit Deploy AI in Minutes, Not Months: Organisations can run production AI workloads on Google Cloud today against existing on-premises datasets without migration planning, transfer delays, or extended compliance cycles. Using VAST DataSpace and intelligent streaming, they can present a consistent global namespace of data across on-prem and Google Cloud instantly. Reduce Data-Movement Costs: Stream only the subsets that models require to avoid full replication and reduce egress – cutting footprint and redirecting budget from data movement to AI innovation with infrastructure that is future-ready for the demanding AI pipelines in genomics, structural biology, and financial services. Maximise Google Cloud Innovation with Flexible Data Placement: Choose what to migrate, replicate, or cache to Google Cloud while keeping one namespace and consistent governance by applying unified access controls, audit, and retention policies everywhere to simplify compliance and reduce operational risk. Leverage VAST DataStore and VAST DataBase to unify prep, training, inference, and analytics without rewiring pipelines. TPU-Ready Data Path: Feed TPU VMs over validated NFS paths with optimised model-load and small-file/metadata-aware I/O, achieving warm-start load times on par with local NVMe while maintaining predictable, steady behaviour during cold-starts. Build on a Unified Platform: The VAST AI Operating System delivers a DataStore, DataBase, InsightEngine, AgentEngine and DataSpace that scales across on-premises and Google Cloud environments and adapts to changing business needs without architectural rewrites, enabling data scientists to use a variety of access protocols with a single solution. VAST can be deployed today in Google Cloud. Joint validation and reference guidance for establishing a VAST DataSpace spanning Google Cloud and external clusters are available to qualified customers and partners.