VAST InsightEngine on Cisco AI PODs At-a-Glance
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Accelerate enterprise RAG with real-time data Insights
Enterprises are rapidly moving beyond AI experimentation to deploying production-scale agentic AI systems. Success hinges on making the right data available at the right time, a challenge for legacy infrastructures. The NVIDIA AI Data Platform, powered by Cisco® and VAST InsightEngine, provides a validated, enterprise-class foundation designed specifically for this shift.
Built on Cisco UCS® (including Cisco Unified Communications for RTX PRO Server for compute and Cisco UCS C225 M8 for VAST EBOX storage), integrated with VAST Data AI OS, and powered by NVIDIA AI Enterprise, this solution unifies compute, fabric, and storage into a single, secure platform. It accelerates RAG pipelines, streamlines data movement, and enables agentic AI workflows at scale, moving your organization beyond experimentation to real business outcomes.
VAST InsightEngine architecture Framework for NVIDIA AI Data Platform
● Accelerate AI Insights: Speed Retrieval- Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and unlock the full potential of agentic AI with near-real-time data access.
● Validated and Unified Infrastructure: Deploy a pre-tested, scalable architecture that seamlessly integrates compute, networking, and storage for optimal AI performance.
● Enterprise-Grade Security and Governance: Ensure data integrity and compliance with built-in policy-based access, audit readiness, and Cisco's Zero-Trust AI infrastructure.
● Flexible Deployment and Scaling: Support diverse AI workloads and grow seamlessly from experimentation to production with modular, cloud-managed AI PODs.
“With VAST InsightEngine and NVIDIA AI Data Platform running on Cisco AI PODs, enterprises can finally bring AI agents to life at scale.”
VAST data platform: The AI-native data foundation
VAST Data Platform, foundation for agentic AI
The VAST Data Platform, particularly its AI Operating System (AI OS) with InsightEngine, represents a groundbreaking shift in enterprise data management, purpose-built for the demands of modern AI. It unifies all enterprise data types—files, objects, tables, and streams—into a single, scalable semantic database. Built on VAST’s innovative DASE (Disaggregated, Shared-Everything) architecture, it delivers linear scalability, exceptional performance, and unparalleled efficiency.
VAST Data Platform acts as an AI-native data engine that eliminates traditional data preparation bottlenecks. Its InsightEngine processes data in real time as it's ingested, instantly creating vector embeddings and establishing graph relationships.
This makes data immediately available and consumable for AI tasks such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling AI agents to access and reason over vast, diverse, and multimodal enterprise data without latency.
It provides a “single source of truth” for AI, supporting complex AI workloads and multimodal AI agents by transforming raw data into instant AI-ready datasets.
Benefits of running on Cisco C225 M8 Servers with intersight management
Integrating the VAST Data Platform with Cisco UCS C225 M8 servers, managed by Cisco Intersight®, offers significant advantages for enterprise AI initiatives:
● Validated Performance and Reliability: The Cisco UCS C225 M8 servers are specifically designated as the "EBOX" (storage servers) for the VAST Data Platform within the Cisco AI POD architecture. This pre-validated integration ensures optimal performance, high throughput, and low latency for VAST's data-intensive operations, delivering the reliability required for critical AI pipelines.
● Seamless Integration into AI PODs: The C225 M8 servers seamlessly integrate into the broader Cisco AI POD framework, which combines compute (NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers), networking (Cisco Hyperfabric), and storage into a cohesive, pre-tested, and scalable solution. This simplifies deployment and ensures predictable performance across the entire AI infrastructure.
● Simplified Operations with Cisco Intersight: Managing the VAST Data Platform on Cisco C225 M8 servers is streamlined through Cisco Intersight. This unified cloud management platform provides a single pane of glass for automated provisioning, monitoring, and lifecycle management of the entire Cisco UCS infrastructure. Intersight reduces operational overhead, minimizes complexity, and allows IT teams to focus on AI innovation rather than infrastructure management.
● Enterprise-Grade Foundation: Leveraging Cisco's robust server infrastructure ensures the stability, security, and uptime necessary for demanding enterprise AI workloads, providing a solid foundation for your AI factory.
Transform data into actionable AI intelligence
This integrated solution transforms enterprise storage into an AI-ready knowledge retrieval system, making massive, unstructured data instantly usable by AI. It delivers high-performance data retrieval and orchestration for autonomous workflows, fueling generative AI with accurate, contextual knowledge. Our unique approach leverages the RTX PRO Server from Cisco, UCS C845A M8, for powerful compute and Cisco UCS C225 M8 servers as EBOX storage nodes running VAST Data Platform, all managed by Cisco Intersight for simplified operations.
Unlike GPU-focused AI stacks that lack integrated data intelligence, we provide a complete Data + Compute + Networking reference design. While storage-only solutions offer limited compute integration, our platform deeply integrates NVIDIA AI Enterprise on Cisco AI PODs. For those concerned about cloud-only offerings’ security and governance challenges, we offer enterprise control with hybrid flexibility. This solution supports SDS Modernization, serves as a robust storage solution for Cisco AI PODs, and offers a turnkey approach with cloud-managed networking, integrated PODs, and automated deployment via Cisco Hyperfabric.
Accelerate your enterprise AI journey
Unlock the full power of agentic AI with the validated NVIDIA AI Data Platform on Cisco and VAST Data. Learn more about how Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA can accelerate your enterprise AI adoption securely and at scale.
Read VAST Data on Cisco UCS® Data Sheet: (To the new VAST on Cisco UCS® Data Sheet)