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Is VAST Data’s New InsightEngine the Solution for Enterprise RAG?

Is VAST Data’s New InsightEngine the Solution for Enterprise RAG?

Analyst(s): Mitch Lewis, Camberley Bates, and Mitch Ashley
Publication Date: October 4, 2024

VAST Data unveiled a new InsightEngine capability, in partnership with NVIDIA, at its recent Cosmos event. The new functionality simplifies Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for organizations building generative AI applications. The announcement of InsightEngine furthers VAST’s transformation from a storage vendor to offering a complete AI data platform, and offers a streamlined approach for organizations to deploy more accurate AI applications.

What is Covered in this Article:

  • VAST Data announced a new InsightEngine capability in partnership with NVIDIA to address RAG AI workloads.
  • RAG enables enterprise organizations to enhance GenAI responses with external data, without additional training. InsightEngine simplifies this process by leveraging the VAST DataEngine in combination with NVIDIA NIM.
  • To further assist in the RAG process, VAST announced real-time data processing capabilities that avoid delays due to batch processing and enable greater data availability for AI tasks.

The News: VAST Data’s Cosmos event held several announcements, including a new AI community called Cosmos, a collaboration with Equinix and NVIDIA for high performance data centers, and an extension of VAST’s partnership with Cisco to provide end-to-end, full stack AI infrastructure. Most notably, however, was the announcement of the new VAST InsightEngine, in collaboration with NVIDIA, which provides an efficient, scalable solution for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Is VAST Data’s New InsightEngine the Solution for Enterprise RAG?

Analyst Take: VAST Data’s Cosmos event was heavily focused on AI, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the company over the last few years. Over this time, VAST has actively transitioned from a “data storage company” to a “data platform company” – adding data capabilities beyond the VAST DataStore, including VAST DataBase, VAST DataSpace, and VAST DataEngine. With the AI boom, VAST was also quick to position itself as an immediate player in the data and AI space, leveraging this expanded set of capabilities. With its latest announcements at Cosmos, VAST is further solidifying its role as an AI data solution and ecosystem player going well beyond its data storage roots.

The Cosmos event was headlined by the announcement of a new InsightEngine capability, in partnership with NVIDIA. InsightEngine leverages the VAST DataEngine to automatically trigger a call to NVIDIA Inference Microservices (NIM) to create vector embeddings upon the ingestion of new data. These vector embeddings, which encode semantic meaning, are then stored in the VAST DataBase to be utilized in RAG workloads. The InsightEngine is also key to maintaining security and permissions necessary for compliance.

The Role of RAG in AI

RAG has become a core step in implementing practical and accurate generative AI applications. Essentially, RAG adds additional context to the AI generated response. While the core model is trained on a large corpus of data, it may not be aware of recent or topic-specific information that was not included in the training dataset. By utilizing RAG, organizations can incorporate enterprise-specific data into LLMs without performing additional training or exposing their data directly to the model. Leveraging VAST’s high performance data platform positions organizations to target industry-specific use cases, maintain data security, and reduce costly model training.

A key challenge for RAG, however, is integrating vector databases, knowledge graphs, search engines, traditional databases, and other data technologies. In order for external data to be utilized in the RAG process, it must be encoded into vector embeddings and stored in a vector database. Typically, this adds an additional layer of complexity and software for IT organizations to handle, due to the required integration of a vector database. By providing a unified data platform, VAST InsightEngine with NVIDIA streamlines data workloads that capture, embed, and retrieve real-time data flows, removing the burden of assembling and supporting a collection of diverse data and AI technologies to solve this problem for themselves. Net-net, a platform like VAST InsightEngine can accelerate getting new AI capabilities into production with data management, security, and performance.

Real Time Data Processing

This brings us to the second major functionality they announced, the ability to ingest, in real-time high-speed messaging with their event bus. One of the positions the company has taken is the need to constantly update the data – structured and unstructured – to respond to the ever-changing information. Batch processing to bring data cannot maintain the currency that will be needed to drive the highest confidence in the results returned by the AI machines, specifically RAG.

The core of the announcement, the InsightEngine is stated to become available in 1H 2025.

VAST Data has aggressively gone after the AI market, in some cases taking a lead in their view of integrating the data storage with the data management and vector database. To their credibility, this has been the vision driven by their founders and placing them potentially ahead of the market. However, the vision requires a customer to move all of their data from the current platform to VAST Data. Strategically, this may be the move some companies take to streamline and fast pace the problems with data that are inherent in AI development. We believe we will see this move in some companies, where others will opt to a multi-vendor strategy. Either way, VAST Data has made a huge announcement and a major step forward in addressing the AI data management issues.

What to Watch:

  • The core of the announcement, the InsightEngine is stated to become available in 1H 2025.
  • VAST Data has aggressively gone after the AI market, taking a lead in integrating data storage with data management and vector databases. This has been the vision driven by their founders and placing them potentially ahead of the market.
  • This vision, however, requires a customer to move all of their data from the current platform to VAST Data. Strategically, this may be the move some companies take to streamline AI adoption and quickly address data challenges that are inherent in AI development. Others may see risk in heavily leveraging a single platform.
  • We believe we will see VAST DataPlatform and InsightEngine be the solution to RAG for some companies, where others will opt to a multi-vendor strategy. Either way, VAST Data has made a huge announcement and a major step forward in addressing AI data management issues.

See the complete press release on the VAST Data InsightEngine here.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.

Other insights from The Futurum Group:

VAST Data’s AI Vision

The VAST Data Platform Delivers for AI Pipelines at AI Field Day

VAST Data Expands to Google Cloud

Author Information

Mitch comes to The Futurum Group through the acquisition of the Evaluator Group and is focused on the fast-paced and rapidly evolving areas of cloud computing and data storage. Mitch joined Evaluator Group in 2019 as a Research Associate covering numerous storage technologies and emerging IT trends.

With a passion for all things tech, Mitch brings deep technical knowledge and insight to The Futurum Group’s research by highlighting the latest in data center and information management solutions. Mitch’s coverage has spanned topics including primary and secondary storage, private and public clouds, networking fabrics, and more. With ever changing data technologies and rapidly emerging trends in today’s digital world, Mitch provides valuable insights into the IT landscape for enterprises, IT professionals, and technology enthusiasts alike.

Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.

Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.

Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.

Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead of DevOps and Application Development for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development, and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. As an entrepreneur, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), and the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network.

Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer discussing CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on FuturumGroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.

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