Vast Data Inc. sees a world in which all data is accessible, and the company took the next step toward making that a reality by announcing the Vast InsightEngine in partnership with Nvidia Corp.

Vast Data is a platform that merges the concepts of data storage and database to create a transactional data warehouse on top of an unstructured data store. With Vast InsightEngine, the company now enables agentic AI to make autonomous decisions based on real-time data.

Vast Data’s Jeff Denworth (right) talks about founding the Cosmos community.

“For 40 years you’ve had structured and unstructured data,” said Jeff Denworth (pictured), co-founder of Vast. “The unstructured data is 20 times larger than the structured data market that sits in enterprise data warehouses and databases. Let’s suppose that over the next couple years the unstructured data industry will disappear. Why is that? Because now you can query on all of your data, and I think it’s just a massive opportunity for organizations to unlock their data.”

Denworth spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier at the Vast Presents: Enter the Cosmos event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Vast’s partnership with Nvidia and the future of data architecture for AI. (* Disclosure below.)

How Vast InsightEngine supports real-time agentic AI

The Vast Data platform is built on a triggering system, where every piece of data that flows into it is instantaneously indexed and then updated into the vector database. The Vast InsightEngine will harness this infrastructure for AI-driven decision-making, according to Denworth.

“The InsightEngine basically puts us together with Nvidia, where our software now supports deployment on GPU-based systems with what are called NIMS, which are Nvidia inference microservices,” Denworth said. “You have NIMS for video, you have NIMS for text, you have NIMS for proteins and other bioinformatic data … if you look at the exponential rate of improvement for all these new AI inference models, that all then just gets directed towards your enterprise data and allows you to get a lot smarter about what’s inside of it.”

Vector embeddings are essentially metadata in a new format, Denworth explained. The platform now uses a Kafka broker to support real-time data streams from one’s data warehouse. The speed of these retrievals is essential if businesses want to stay on the cutting edge of AI adoption.

“Agents that are chaining with agents means that businesses are going to start working in GPU time,” he said. “At that point, I don’t think that you can abide a lot of stale data. So, if you think about the way that retrieval engines have been built today, or data warehouses, you always have some other source data that has to be periodically indexed back into where you’re asking your questions to. That doesn’t work for us. The way that we see it is we don’t want AI agents to ever be exposed to any stale data or any stale permissions data so that CISOs are happy, you’re always secure, but businesses are powered by real-time data all the time.”

Vast has also announced Cosmos, a tech community for sharing insights about agentic AI and AI adoption, with the goal of accelerating the development of an AI ecosystem. When it comes to the future of data storage for AI, Denworth believes the possibilities are limitless.

“Our objective is to essentially be universal,” he said. “We want to be on every platform and we want to be in every single data center, on-prem or in the cloud, that a customer may want to compute in. We want to minimize the amount of complexity that customers have to deal with so that they can essentially get this thinking machine’s experience that we’re trying to build towards. That is a ton of work that we have to do on all different levels in order to build out to what customers require for all their data, all their infrastructure, and all the places they want to compute.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Vast Presents: Enter the Cosmos event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Vast Presents: Enter the Cosmos 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