Vast Data Inc., a company that might have initially seemed like just another storage provider, unveiled its “Build Beyond” initiative this morning.

The company outlined its vision for artificial intelligence as the company evolves from its beginnings as a storage company.

“Years ago, when I saw Vast launch, I was like, OK, hey, another storage company. That’s kind of cool,” said industry analyst Dave Vellante (pictured, second from left). “These guys are bringing new thinking to the market in a way that [is] starting to tweak our idea of what that future data platform is going to look like.”

Vellante joined his co-analysts John Furrier (left), Rob Strechay (second from right) and George Gilbert (right), during the keynote analysis at the “Vast presents: Build Beyond” event. The panel discussed the keynote presented earlier in the morning at the Vast presents: Build Beyond event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the implications of Vast’s latest announcement, exploring how it is reimagining the future of data platforms and paving the way for an era where data becomes the API to the real world. (* Disclosure below.)

Unleashing the potential of data platforms

The event, held in Palo Alto, unveiled Vast’s data platform, which aims to redefine the future of data management and analytics. Vast has been making waves in the tech world, and many initially perceived it as just another storage company. However, the company has revealed that it is much more than that. Beyond the technical documentation, Vast has built a data platform that goes far beyond conventional storage protocols, enabling a new way of thinking about data, according to the analyst panel.

“Let’s get a sense of what just happened with Vast Data, because this is a revolutionary moment,” Furrier said. “It brings a new era of data developer mindset into it. It’s not just storage. This is a data platform that they’re doing here.”

The core idea behind Vast’s data platform is to treat data as an API to the real world, a representation of the real-world events and activities. This vision necessitates a fundamental shift in how data platforms are constructed. In the past, data platforms were based on specific data types, such as files, objects or tables. However, Vast’s new approach recognizes data’s distributed nature across sites and data centers, demanding a reimagining of the entire data platform concept.

This reimagined data platform allows developers to program, compute and learn from data independent of its location, according to the panel. Whether the data resides in on-premises servers or the cloud, Vast’s platform seamlessly bridges the gap and ensures accessibility without compromising performance or scalability. This flexibility is crucial in the era of AI, where deep learning and other data-intensive applications require a unified and distributed platform.

“You have to rethink the platform,” Gilbert said. “If data becomes the platform, then you want to be able to program or compute on it or learn on it independently of where it is … you have to rethink all that so that you can bring together files, objects, tables, unstructured and structured data, streaming data coming in transactionally, turning into analytic data.”

Bringing compute power to data

One of the standout features of Vast’s data platform is its emphasis on metadata management. Metadata is important as it serves as the key to making data usable and valuable, according to Gilbert. By bringing compute power to metadata, Vast ensures that developers can rapidly find and process data for their applications.

Vast’s platform leverages small file updates and sub-parquet file-level updates, addressing the issue of data gravity. Instead of being bound by data location, the platform allows developers to access and process small pieces of data in a distributed manner, making it a perfect fit for AI workloads and future data scenarios, according to the analysts.

“When you look at how data engineering is happening and data developers, the data is not in one place,” Strechay said. “You have to first be able to find the data. I think this is kind of the layer stack of … building a house. You have to have the right foundation to build those data, data features, data products and data apps on top of.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Vast presents: Build Beyond event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Vast presents: Build Beyond” event. Neither Vast Data Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE