VAST Data has announced the launch of the VAST AI Operating System, a purpose-built platform designed to power the next era of AI innovation.
VAST Data has announced the launch of the VAST AI Operating System, a purpose-built platform designed to power the next era of AI innovation. Nearly a decade in the making, the VAST AI Operating System is engineered to harness the capabilities of modern AI supercomputing infrastructure and unlock AI’s full potential at scale.
At its core, the platform leverages VAST’s Disaggregated and Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, which enables the parallelization of AI and analytics workloads and federates clusters into a unified computing and data cloud. It also delivers near-infinite data throughput from a single, high-performance, cost-effective storage tier. Today, DASE clusters support over one million GPUs worldwide, serving some of the most data-intensive computing environments.
The VAST AI Operating System is designed to unify disparate legacy IT technologies into a single, modern platform that democratizes access to AI computing. Rather than simply aggregating features, VAST has developed a new computing substrate that tightly integrates data, compute, messaging, and reasoning. This architecture can capture real-world data at scale, enrich it with real-time AI-driven context, and facilitate efficient and intelligent workflows. The result is a platform that advances VAST’s vision of a “Thinking Machine”—a system that not only stores and processes data, but also understands and reasons with it.
Renen Hallak, CEO of VAST Data, describes this launch as a pivotal moment in the evolution of computing. He emphasizes that the VAST AI Operating System is built around the concept of agents, moving beyond traditional application-centric models. This agent-centric approach is designed to support AI at a global scale, providing a comprehensive kernel for platform services across private and public clouds, a runtime for deploying AI agents, real-time event processing, and a robust messaging infrastructure. It also includes a distributed file and database storage system for capturing real-time data and performing analytics.
Introducing the VAST AgentEngine
A key innovation within the VAST AI Operating System is the AgentEngine, which brings AI models and agents to life within the platform. In 2024, VAST previewed the InsightEngine, which extracts context from unstructured data using advanced AI embedding tools. While InsightEngine prepares data for AI consumption, AgentEngine operationalizes that data by providing an auto-scaling runtime for deploying AI agents. This low-code environment allows users to build intelligent workflows, select reasoning models, define agent tools, and operationalize complex reasoning tasks.
The AgentEngine introduces a new AI agent tool server, enabling agents to invoke data, metadata, functions, web search, or other agents as MCP-compatible tools. Agents can assume multiple personas with distinct purposes and security credentials, ensuring secure, real-time access to various tools and systems. The platform’s scheduler and fault-tolerant queuing mechanisms provide resilience, enabling agents to continue operating seamlessly even in the event of machine or service failures.
Another standout feature is the platform’s massively scalable agentic workflow observability. Through parallel, distributed tracing, the VAST AI Operating System provides developers with a unified and simplified view of complex, large-scale agentic pipelines, streamlining the management and optimization of AI workflows.
Just as traditional operating systems come with built-in utilities, the VAST AgentEngine will include a suite of open-source agents. VAST plans to release one new agent each month. These agents will address industry-specific and general-purpose use cases, such as:
- A reasoning chatbot that leverages all of an organization’s VAST data
- A data engineering agent for automated data curation
- A prompt engineer to optimize AI workflow inputs
- An “agent agent” to automate the deployment, evaluation, and improvement of other agents
- A compliance agent to enforce regulatory requirements at the data and activity level
- An editor agent for rich media content creation
- A life sciences researcher to assist with bioinformatics discovery
To accelerate adoption and development on the VAST AI Operating System, VAST Data will host a series of global workshops throughout the year, both in-person and online. These sessions will provide training on the platform’s components and hands-on guidance for building and deploying solutions on the new operating system.
With the introduction of the VAST AI Operating System, VAST Data is setting a new standard for unified, intelligent infrastructure. It empowers technical sales teams, engineers, and executives to drive the next wave of AI-driven business transformation.
Engage with StorageReview
Newsletter | YouTube | Podcast iTunes/Spotify | Instagram | Twitter | TikTok | RSS Feed
