Vast Data & Cisco team up to twist turnkey for enterprise AI
Vast Data Cisco have expanded their collaborative partnership.
The two firms say they are focused on creating a validated AI infrastructure stack that spans compute, networking, storage and observability.
The Vast AI Operating System is now available directly through Cisco’s Global Price List (GPL) with support from Cisco to help software engineering teams build, operate and scale AI environments.
How does that happen?
Because Vast AI OS runs alongside Cisco UCS servers, Nexus switching, and Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI.
To explain these terms:
- Cisco UCS (Unified Compute System) is an integrated datacenter architecture combining computing, networking and management to work as a high-performance, scalable server system.
- Cisco Nexus switches are a family of datacenter network switches for high-speed, high-density datacenter networking and Storage Area Networks (SANs).
- Cisco Hyperfabric AI is an infrastructure service for AI workload management in datacenters that combines Cisco’s networking and compute hardware with capitalisation-focused chip company Nvidia’s GPUs and AI software as well as Vast Data storage functionality.
Vast founder and CEO Renen Hallak has been upbeat about this now-expanded partnership.
“This partnership represents the convergence of two best-in-class platforms to create a foundational blueprint for enterprise AI,” said Hallak “We’re delivering the turnkey simplicity, observability and scalability that enterprises need to deploy and manage intelligent systems.”
Turnkey is no turkey
The companies say that it’s turnkey-ness here will help technical teams build “enterprise AI factories” i.e. operational units designed to create agentic, data-intensive AI systems at scale, thereby ensuring performance from edge-to-core-to-cloud.
This technology enables users to unify data pipelines, automate infrastructure management and reason over real-time data using scalable, zero-trust AI infrastructure.
“Cisco and Vast share a vision for making AI infrastructure accessible, secure and scalable for every enterprise,” said Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Compute. “We’re enabling customers to collapse complexity and unlock faster time-to-value by providing a unified infrastructure stack built for the demands of AI.”
The joint solution integrates key technologies across both platforms, including a consolidated AI infrastructure stack with a jointly validated, enterprise-grade platform that brings together Cisco’s compute and networking leadership with the Vast AI Operating System.
“Customers can now run end-to-end AI pipelines – from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to real-time reasoning – directly within Vast’s AI OS on Cisco UCS. VAST InsightEngine accelerates vector search, data preparation and inference workflows at the point of data, while AgentEngine takes this further by orchestrating autonomous agents that continuously operate on live data streams, enabling real-time, event-driven decision-making. These capabilities empower Cisco environments to become intelligent execution layers, turning raw data into insight,” detailed the companies, in a joint press statement.
This whole approach is designed to create a consolidated software stack that simplifies infrastructure complexity by unifying structured, unstructured and vector data management with agentic compute services… all of which is there to enable real-time reasoning for next-gen AI applications and workflow automation at scale.