VAST Data Soars with Industry Heavyweights

With new industry, collaborations VAST Data accelerates their ambition as the AI data platform.

VAST Data has been on a tear. If you haven't been following this company, you've missed a great story about transformation from storage platform to insightful data control for the AI era. Today vast unveiled multiple industry collaborations that fill in details of their strategy and showcase VAST’s bold direction to re-define data storage and oversight from cloud to edge.

Let’s unpack today’s news. We’ll start with an announcement on the new VAST Data AI platform featuring NVIDIA DPU's. This is a fundamentally different take on data and redefines platform architecture into a powerful GPU platform complemented with Bluefield DPUs each running a containerized version of the VAST OS embedding storage and database processing directly into the GPU platform.

What you’ll notice is missing is any mention of x86 architecture eliminating the concept of the CPU head node. VAST points to the increased efficiency of this design claiming a power utilization and footprint reduction of up to 70% and a
“net energy consumption” savings of up to 5% vs previous platforms featuring VAST distributed data services and NVIDIA silicon.

VAST is also leaning into the core capabilities delivered with this platform with increased QoS through direct reads and writes to shared name spaces across the cluster, enhanced zero-trust security through use of industry standard NFS, SMB, S3 and Apache Arrow service delivery, and the addition of native block storage to compliment historic file and object storage.

So where do you get this platform? Enter collaboration announcement number two, a comprehensive collaboration with Supermicro to fuel system delivery for the AI factory. Here, the two companies point to delivering platforms that scale to exabyte level clusters. VAST and Supermicro promise support for the entire data pipeline from data prep to data training with VAST’s DataBase and DataStore solutions. Supermicro is known for swiftly getting innovative platforms to market, so I’m excited to see what they actually deliver to support this bold move for both companies.

What’s TechArena’s take? The AI training game is moving from GPU centric to GPU native with new architectural frameworks fueling these massive clusters. VAST Data’s history in high performance computing and their DASE (disaggregated share everything) architecture places them as a central player for organizations looking to integrate distributed data into AI training. AI is the killer app of the era forcing re-definition of the fundamental constructs that have fueled computing for the last thirty years, and this magnitude of disruption will reshape the infrastructure industry. Based on recent history and today’s announcements, VAST Data is positioning itself well as a disruptive force. I can’t wait to see more from the company in 2024.