Vast Data unveils Cosmos in a push to advance enterprise AI
Vast Data held its Cosmos event, which helped solidify the direction the company is headed and highlighted its community to support AI in the enterprise.
Vast Data continues to evolve from its storage beginnings, defining a clearer path to how it plans to support AI in the enterprise with help from a community of partners and customers.
At its Journey to the Cosmos event Tuesday, Vast showcased its new InsightEngine with Nvidia for real-time retrieval of data for fine tuning of AI models, as well as its new Cosmos initiative, a who's who of AI technology vendors and consultants focused on helping customers find and execute on use cases. This week's virtual event brought together customers and partners who talked about the evolving nature of AI as it makes more of a headway into the enterprise, and the new categories AI will produce in the future.
Renen Hallak, co-founder and CEO of Vast Data, opened the show by highlighting how the vendor pivoted from a distributed, all-flash software-defined storage company to a data management company with its introduction of Vast Data Platform in 2023. It added to its data management lineup with the Vast DataBase, which it released earlier this year, and InsightEngine, released this week.
"We built beyond storage to become the full-stack software infrastructure layer -- the foundation for the next generation of AI," Hallak said.
Enterprise workloads = AI workloads
Hallak said traditional infrastructure can't match the pace of AI's evolution and that soon, the distinction between enterprise workloads and AI workloads will cease to exist. Seeing this, Vast has added fast access to growing unstructured data with its Data Store and then bridged the gap with the addition of the Vast DataBase.
"Those lines are now beginning to blur as we see more images and video and sound, the weight of infrastructure shifts from compute-intensive to a more balanced mix of compute and data," Hallak said.
Vast's InsightEngine, part of the Vast Data Platform, provides a real-time retrieval of customer data to refine AI responses. It's also another indicator of the company moving beyond infrastructure to offer a product that combines data management and storage.
Vast's transition is an effort to move "up the stack," according to Jack Gold, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates LLC.
"It's great to be an infrastructure company that does data management," he said in an interview with TechTarget Editorial. "But it's better to be a solution provider where you can be the central point."
Data is siloed, Gold said, be it in databases, clouds or on different storage devices. If customers need to feed AI for retrieval-augmented generation, for example, they'll need access to their data in real time and they'll need to be able to move it to AI models for refinement, which Vast is now offering.
While this puts Vast somewhat in competition with data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake or Databricks, Vast has the advantage an NVMe-mesh infrastructure, which allows for better resource and storage allocation, Gold said.
Into the Cosmos
Cosmos is a community initiative designed to develop and foster an AI community around simplifying and accelerating AI adoption, according to Marianne Budnik, CMO at Vast. With Cosmos, practitioners, researchers and vendors can utilize vendors' growing library of AI reference architectures.
"Cosmos will open lines of communication and provide a real-time collaboration platform for practitioners, researchers and solution providers to exchange ideas," she said.
Vast is focused on an inner circle of consultants, vendors and customers to create its Cosmos initiative, and having an ecosystem where experiences in AI are shared and compared can accelerate learning, Gold said.
"It's always good to have a broad swath of industry come together and discuss problems," he said.
While there is talk about the ease of deploying and consuming AI, the reality is that the entire journey is complex, according to Matt Kimball, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
If the concept of Cosmos is realized, it's going to tear down a lot of barriers to enterprise AI adoption.
Matt KimballAnalyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
"If the concept of Cosmos is realized, it's going to tear down a lot of barriers to enterprise AI adoption," he said, adding that it provides customers a forum to post questions and share experiences.
Progress in AI is fueled by collaboration and will lead to faster insights and better models, according to Nicolas Chapados, vice president of research at ServiceNow Research.
"We certainly envision a future where every worker is empowered by a set of AI agents to solve more complex problems," he said.
David Rice, global chief operating officer of commercial banking at HSBC, a British universal bank and financial services group, said he sees the partnership between human and machine eventually flipping, where AI will underpin how banks operate and humans will supplement the AI. He said he believes it will take collaborative work to get there.
"The hardest problems are never solved by any one person. This is going to be done by partnerships up and down the supply chain," he said. "Events like Cosmos are so important to bring communities together, thought leaders together, and it allows people to think about problems differently."
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.
