It is often said that “90% of the world’s data is unstructured.” For decades, enterprises have struggled to not only store vast amounts of this data but also to extract actionable insights from it. VAST Data was founded to address this challenge head-on. From the very beginning, our mission has been twofold: to revolutionize the efficiency of storing unstructured data (in terms of cost, data center space, and power) and to empower organizations to derive valuable insights from their data.
Over the years, our commitment has borne fruit. Today, our customers store exabytes of data using the VAST Data Platform, with many storing immense volumes of unstructured data such as text, video, images, and other rich media. Industries ranging from Media & Entertainment to Automotive, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Banking and Government rely on VAST to tackle their most complex data challenges.
The VAST InsightEngine with NVIDIA: Enabling AI-Driven Data Insights
This past October, VAST Data unveiled the VAST InsightEngine with NVIDIA, the world’s first solution to securely ingest, process, and retrieve all enterprise data—files, objects, tables, and streams—in real time. As the first application workflow to run on the VAST Data Platform, the VAST InsightEngine accelerates business insights by capturing, embedding, and retrieving from real-time data flows, making enterprise data instantly usable for AI-driven decision-making.
With the rise of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-enhanced large language models (LLMs), enterprises face unique challenges in processing massive datasets for effective model grounding. Unlike training-focused AI efforts, scaling RAG workflows demands infrastructure capable of classifying and searching across unstructured and structured data with semantic techniques like vector search. The VAST InsightEngine directly addresses these needs, providing unprecedented speed, scale, simplicity, and security to support real-time AI-driven insights.
The VAST InsightEngine is the first unified system that handles all data functions natively, simplifying workflows and delivering real-time AI-powered insights at scale. It integrates NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, demonstrating exceptional AI-driven data processing by embedding the semantic meaning of incoming data with advanced models powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing. Vector embeddings are seamlessly stored in the VAST DataBase in real time, enabling immediate readiness for AI retrieval and inference operations while helping set a new benchmark in enterprise AI infrastructure.
Making Enterprise Data Actionable
Enterprises today hold vast volumes of data from various sources that remain untapped, representing significant potential for actionable insights. This data often resides within an enterprise’s infrastructure, inaccessible to public LLM offerings. The VAST InsightEngine changes this paradigm by offering a platform to:
Ingest and Prepare Data: Whether it’s documents, camera footage, or machine-generated data, the InsightEngine ingests, transforms, chunks, and generates vector embeddings for these datasets.
Enable Generative AI: By indexing data and creating vectorized representations, users and agents can issue prompts to retrieve grounded responses from all of their data.
Extract Value Across Modalities: From text to video to machine data, the InsightEngine supports multimodal synthesis to uncover actionable insights.
Leverage Common File Formats: Any data in commonly understood file formats can be seamlessly processed through the system, helping ensure insights can be derived efficiently and effectively.
Ensure Robust Security: The VAST InsightEngine leverages a unified security model, helping ensure access control is enforced end-to-end through the entire pipeline, from initial ingest to retrieval. This is made possible with a unified platform that stores and processes unstructured, structured, and streaming data.
Deploy AI with Simplicity: The InsightEngine is a fully packaged, simple solution for customers to deploy AI in production.
Turning NVIDIA AI Blueprints into Enterprise-Ready Solutions
NVIDIA AI Blueprints serve as powerful guides for building AI applications. The VAST InsightEngine transforms these blueprints into turnkey enterprise solutions, integrating real-time capabilities and robust security end-to-end. One of the first use cases we’ve tackled is the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for multi-modal document extraction. This enables enterprises to process PDFs in real time and make their contents accessible for RAG applications in a secure, scalable manner.
Multimodal PDF Data Extraction: A Game-Changer
The multimodal document data extraction workflow leverages NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices, built with NVIDIA NIM, to unlock insights from vast repositories of enterprise data. By combining AI with cutting-edge workflows, enterprises will be able to:
Automatically extract knowledge from complex PDFs, including text, charts, and images.
Power applications like digital humans, AI agents, and chatbots with instant expertise on any topic within their corpus.
Supercharge generative AI applications with proprietary data retrieval capabilities.
This approach is not just theoretical—it’s practical and impactful. By using NVIDIA NIM microservices, enterprises can dramatically reduce the time to market for AI applications while optimizing cost and scalability.
Tackling AI Challenges for Video Insights
Building on the success of multimodal document extraction, VAST is working with NVIDIA to tackle the next frontier: leveraging AI to understand video data.
NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization, built on top of the NVIDIA Metropolis platform. With this Blueprint, we are enabling:
Automated generation of detailed incident reports and summaries, such as those required for accident analysis.
Real-time assessment of space utilization and enforcement of operational compliance, supporting enhanced worker safety and adherence to standard operating procedures.
Intelligent anomaly detection across dynamic environments, including industrial facilities and urban traffic systems.
Advanced content indexing and retrieval for archived video, enabling rapid and precise searches within massive video repositories.
These capabilities represent high-value applications across industries.
Building a Studio Experience for AI Deployment
VAST InsightEngine offers enterprises a studio experience to simplify the deployment of AI pipelines in production. This includes triggers, pre-built functions, and templates, which customers can use to construct their own data-centric pipelines. With a few clicks, they are able to:
Customize and Share Logic: Build and share custom AI workflows tailored to specific data types and business needs.
Manage Identity and Access control: Assign flexible and granular security policies for functions, pipelines and RAG retrieval, with full auditing capabilities for data lineage, governance, and provenance requirements.
Rely on a Fully Managed Platform: Let the VAST Data Platform handle all aspects of pipeline management, from resilience to scalability.
Looking Ahead: General Availability and Real-World Use Cases
The VAST InsightEngine is undergoing beta testing with select enterprise customers across a wide spectrum of disciplines, demonstrating its capabilities across real-world scenarios. Feedback from these early deployments is shaping the final product, helping ensure it meets the needs of enterprises at scale.
We pride ourselves on addressing the world’s most complex data problems. The intersection of AI and unstructured data is a natural extension of our expertise. We’re excited to showcase these groundbreaking capabilities at NVIDIA GTC in March 2025.
Stay tuned as we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and unstructured data. The future of enterprise AI is here, and with VAST, it’s more accessible than ever.
