VAST Data unveils the VAST data platform- a global data infrastructure built from the ground up for the future of AI.
According to IDC Worldwide AI Spending Guide, Feb (2023 V1), global spending on AI-centric systems continues to grow at double digit rates, reaching a five-year (2021-2026) CAGR of 27% to exceed $308 billion by 2026.
“Data is foundational to AI systems and the success of AI systems depends crucially on the quality of the data, not just their size,” said Ritu Jyoti, Group Vice President, AI and Automation Research Practice at IDC.
“With a novel systems architecture that spans a multi-cloud infrastructure, VAST is laying the foundation for machines to collect, process and collaborate on data at a global scale in a unified computing environment – and opening the door to AI-automated discovery that can solve some of humanity’s most complex challenges,” Jyoti said.
VAST Data has unveiled the full vision for the company by introducing a transformative data computing platform designed to be the foundation of AI-assisted discovery.
The platform is VAST’s global data infrastructure offering, unifying storage, database and virtualized compute engine services in a scalable system that was built from the ground up for the future of AI.
While generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced the world to the early capabilities of Artificial Intelligence, LLMs are limited to performing routine tasks like business reporting or reciting information that is already known.
The true promise of AI will be realized when machines can recreate the process of discovery by capturing, synthesising and learning from data – achieving a level of specialisation that used to take decades in a matter of days.
The era of AI-driven discovery will accelerate humanity’s quest to solve its biggest challenges.
AI can help industries find treatments for disease and cancers, forge new paths to tackle climate change, pioneer revolutionary approaches to agriculture and uncover new fields of science and mathematics that the world has not yet even considered.
As such, enterprises are increasingly turning their focus to AI applications.
Today’s existing data platforms have become popular for global enterprises, dramatically reducing infrastructure deployment complexity for business intelligence and reporting applications but are not built to meet the needs of new Deep Learning applications.
This next generation of AI infrastructure must deliver parallel file access, GPU-optimized performance for neural network training and inference on unstructured data and a global namespace spanning hybrid multi-cloud and edge environments – all unified within one easy to manage offering in order to enable federated Deep Learning.
The VAST Data Platform was built with the entire data spectrum of natural data in mind – unstructured and structured data types in the form of video, imagery, free text, data streams and instrument data – generated from all over the world and processed against an entire global data corpus in real-time.
This approach aims to close the gap between event-driven and data-driven architectures by providing the ability to:
- Access and process data in any private or major public cloud data center
- Understand natural data by embedding a queryable semantic layer into the data itself
- Continuously and recursively compute data in real time, evolving with each interaction
For more than seven years, VAST has been building toward a vision that puts data – natural data, rich metadata, functions and triggers – at the center of the VAST Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) distributed systems architecture.
DASE lays the data foundation for Deep Learning by eliminating trade-offs of performance, capacity, scale, simplicity and resilience to make it possible to train models on all of an enterprise’s data.
By allowing customers to now add logic to the system – machines can continuously and recursively enrich and understand data from the natural world.
To capture and serve data from the natural world, VAST first engineered the foundation of its VAST DataStore platform.
The exabyte-scale DataStore is built with best-in-class system efficiency to bring archive economics to flash infrastructure – making it also suitable for archive applications. Resolving the cost of flash storage has been critical to laying the foundation for Deep Learning for enterprise customers as they look to train models on their proprietary data assets.
To date, VAST has managed more than ten exabytes of data globally with leading customers including Booking.com, NASA, Pixar Animation Studios, Zoom Video Communications and many others.
To apply structure to unstructured natural data, VAST has added a semantic database layer natively into the system with the introduction of the VAST DataBase.
Applying first-principles simplification of structured data by combining the characteristics of a database, a data warehouse and a data lake all in one simple, distributed and unified database management system, VAST has resolved the trade-offs between transactions (to capture and catalogue natural data in real time) and analytics (to analyze and correlate data in real-time).
Designed for rapid data capture and fast queries at any scale, the VAST DataBase is the first system to break the barriers of real-time analytics from the event stream all the way to the archive.
With a foundation for synthesised structured and unstructured data, the VAST Data Platform then makes it possible to refine and enrich raw unstructured data into structured, queryable information with the addition of support for functions and triggers.
The VAST DataEngine is a global function execution engine that consolidates data centers and cloud regions into one global computational framework.
VAST DataSpace is the final element of the VAST Data Platform strategy – a global namespace that permits every location to store, retrieve and process data from any location and enforcing strict consistency across every access point.
With the DataSpace, the VAST Data Platform is deployable in on-premises data centers and edge environments, extending DataSpace access into leading public cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“We’ve been working toward this moment since our first days and we’re incredibly excited to unveil the world’s first data platform built from the ground up for the next generation of AI-driven discovery,” said Renen Hallak, CEO and Co-Founder, VAST Data.
