(Picture courtesy VAST Information)
It’s not on daily basis that you just see a brand new working system launched. However VAST Information at present claims to have completed precisely that with the launch of what it’s calling a brand new working system for AI. The VAST AI Working System builds on the corporate’s present information and AI infrastructure developments and provides clients the power to construct and run AI purposes utilizing their very own information.
VAST Information says we’d like a brand new working system as a result of we’re on the “daybreak of a brand new computing paradigm.” Simply because the PC, cell, and cloud revolutions gave us new abstractions of complexity, the brand new agentic AI world calls for a brand new software program layer to democratize the usage of new {hardware}.
The period of deep studying has created the necessity for a brand new working system that may remodel AI infrastructure into “easy to make use of and scalable machines,” VAST Co-founder Jeff Denworth says in a video launched at present.
“To us it’s grow to be abundantly clear that the methods during which deep studying workloads are computing look completely nothing just like the enterprise methods of yesterday,” Denworth says. “We’re rapidly shifting to an age the place there will probably be tens of millions of GPUs and each conventional system will break underneath the burden of this computing energy as a result of they have been by no means designed for this scale and this depth.”
(Picture courtesy VAST Information)
The VAST crew has been constructing out its information platform since Denworth, Renen Hallak, and Shachar Fienblit, co-founded the corporate a couple of decade in the past. VAST took a clean-sheet strategy to constructing its platform round NVMe drives utilizing its Disaggregated and Shared All the things, or DASE, idea.
The primary aspect of the brand new DASE strategy with VAST Information Platform was the VAST DataStore, which offers massively scalable object and file storage for structured and unstructured information. Subsequent was the DataBase, which capabilities as a desk retailer and offers information lakehouse performance much like Apache Iceberg. Then it launched the DataEngine, which offers the potential to execute capabilities on information. Subsequent got here DataSpace, which offers a worldwide namespace for storing, retrieving, and processing information from the cloud to the sting.
In October, the New York firm unveiled the InsightEngine, which makes use of Nvidia Inference Microservices (NIMs) from Nvidia and was the primary new utility designed to run atop the platform. In early 2025, the corporate introduced help for block storage and real-time occasion streaming through an Apache Kafka-compatible API. In April the corporate added a number of GenAI capabilities, together with help for vector search and retrieval; serverless triggers and capabilities; and fine-grained entry management.
VAST Co-Founder Jeff Denworth
At this time’s launch of the VAST Working System for AI hinges on the launch of yet one more piece of the puzzle (what we surmise is a vital piece, since its inclusion allows VAST to have what it claims is a wholly new working system). That new element is named the VAST AgentEngine.
In response to VAST, the AgentEngine options an “AI agent device server” that enables brokers to invoke information, metadata, capabilities, and execute Internet searches, or name different brokers utilizing Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP), an rising normal for agentic AI created by Anthropic in late 2024. Brokers can assume completely different personas and sort out completely different duties utilizing completely different safety credentials, VAST says, whereas scheduling and tracing mechanisms present for environment friendly job completion and resiliency.
VAST says it’s going to launch one open supply AI agent per 30 days to run on its AI OS. Among the examples of brokers embody: a reasoning chatbot; a knowledge engineering agent; a immediate engineer; an “agent agent” to assist work with and enhance different agent; a compliance agent; an editor agent; and a life sciences agent to assist with analysis.
(Picture courtesy VAST Information)
Each technological revolution began with new {hardware} and ultimately led to new working methods, VAST CEO and Co-founder Hallak says. For example, the PC revolution gave us Home windows and Mac OS, the Web revolution gave us networking protocols and the Internet browser, whereas cell computing gave us Android and iOS.
“It’s the working system, agnostic to the {hardware} beneath and purposes above, which defines these revolutions and create essentially the most worth by democratizing new {hardware} and utility adoption,” Hallak says in a video posted at present. “AI will dwarf the entire earlier computing brokers in each measurement and velocity.”
“Within the Nineteen Seventies, solely pc scientists might function computer systems. With Home windows everybody might,” he says. “At this time we’re at that very same inflection level with respect to AI. Whoever builds the AI working system will democratize AI by making it easy, by making it safe, and by making it accessible to everybody.”
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