VAST Data’s Andy Pernsteiner On the Underpinnings of Data-Intensive AI/ML Compute Strategies

For this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show Podcast, we sat down for a chat with Andy Pernsteiner, Field CTO of VAST Data. The VAST Data Platform embodies a revolutionary approach to data-intensive AI computing which the company says serves as "the comprehensive software infrastructure required to capture, catalog, refine, enrich, and preserve data" through real-time deep data analysis and deep learning. In September, VAST Data announced a strategic partnership with CoreWeave, whereby CoreWeave will employ the VAST Data Platform to build a global, NVIDIA-powered accelerated computing cloud for deploying, managing and securing hundreds of petabytes of data for generative AI, high performance computing (HPC) and visual effects (VFX) workloads. That announcement followed news in August that Core42 (formerly G42 Cloud), a leading cloud provider in the UAE and VAST Data had joined forces in an ambitious strategic partnership to build a central data foundation for a global network of AI supercomputers that will store and learn from hundreds of petabytes of data. This week, VAST Data has announced another strategic partnership with Lambda, a, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and compute provider for public and private NVIDIA GPU infrastructure, that will enable a hybrid cloud dedicated to AI and deep learning workloads. The partners will build an NVIDIA GPU-powered accelerated computing platform for Generative AI across both public and private clouds. Lambda selected the VAST Data Platform to power its On-Demand GPU Cloud, providing customer GPU deployments for LLM training and inference workloads. The Lambda, CoreWeave and Core42 announcements represent three burgeoning AI cloud providers within the short space of three months who've chosen to standardize with VAST Data as the scalable data platform behind their respective clouds. Such key partnerships position VAST Data to innovate through a new category of data infrastructure that will build the next-generation public cloud, the company contends As Field CTO at VAST Data, Andy Pernsteiner is helping the company's customers to build, deploy, and scale some of the world’s largest and most demanding computing environments. Andy spent the past 15 years focused on supporting and building large scale, high performance data platform solutions. As recounted by his biographical statement, from his humble beginnings as an escalations engineer at pre-IPO Isilon, to leading a team of technical ninjas at MapR, Andy has consistently been on the frontlines of solving some of the toughest challenges that customers face when implementing big data analytics and new-generation AI technologies. Here's a timeline of key points discussed on the podcast: 0:00 - 4:12 - Introducing the VAST Data Platform; recapping VAST Data's latest news announcements; and introducing VAST Data's Field CTO, Andy Pernsteiner. 4:45 - History of the VAST Data Platform. Observations on the growing "stratification" of AI computing practices. 5:34 - Notes on implementing the evolving VAST Data managed platform, both now and in the future. 6:32 - Andy Pernsteiner: "It won't be for everybody...but we're trying to build something that the vast majority of customers and enterprises can use for AI/ML and deep learning." 07:13 - Reading the room, when very few inside that have heard of "a GPU..." or know what its purpose and role is inside AI/ML infrastructure. 07:56 - Andy Pernsteiner: "The fact that CoreWeave exists at all is proof that the market doesn't yet have a way of solving for this big gap between where we are right now, and where we need to get tom in terms of generative AI and in terms of deep learning." 08:17 - How VAST started as a data storage platform, and was extended to include an ambitious database geared for large-scale AI training and inference. 09:02 - How another aspect of VAST is consolidation, "considering what you'd have to do to stitch together a generative AI practice in the cloud." 09:57 - O