Vast and Cloudera Partner to Streamline Enterprise AI Infrastructure

Enterprises deploying artificial intelligence at scale face a challenge: managing multiple copies of data across different systems to support diverse workloads. A unified data foundation can address this problem by allowing organizations to build and run AI applications on shared infrastructure rather than fragmenting their data across separate platforms.

The demand for AI infrastructure is driving closer collaboration between technology vendors. Itamar Ankorion, head of strategic ISV alliances at Vast Data Inc., explained that handling large, mission-critical applications requires both the ability to scale and the performance to match. "Vast and Cloudera have come together to help enterprises create AI factories on a unified data foundation," he said. "The idea is to help customers leverage the data they have to build AI solutions and do it on the right infrastructure, leveraging the [graphics processing units] and doing it successfully."

Building AI on unified infrastructure

Vast's technology enables applications to reach the same data through multiple storage protocols, eliminating the need to maintain separate copies. When paired with Cloudera Anywhere Cloud's data services, this approach creates an architecture where different types of workloads can run on a single data foundation, according to Ankorion.

Graphics processing units represent accelerated compute resources that are both highly parallelized and costly. The key to maximizing their value is ensuring they remain productive. "GPUs at the core are accelerated compute," Ankorion noted. "They're highly, highly parallelized and they're expensive. What you want to make sure is that the GPU doesn't wait on data."

Cloudera is simultaneously broadening its AI ecosystem to make deployment simpler for customers. Joint engineering work and architectural blueprints allow organizations to test AI applications across different industries. Jeremy Reams, senior director of corporate strategy at Cloudera Inc., emphasized that demonstrating business value from expensive Nvidia Corp. GPUs matters significantly to enterprises. "Showing that you're driving value and ROI through these expensive Nvidia [Corp.] GPUs is incredibly important to our customers," he said. "At the end of the day … it's the use cases and the problems that they're solving."

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Ankorion and Reams discussed these topics during EVOLVE26, appearing on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, with hosts Rebecca Knight and Paul Gillin.