In the era of AI-driven enterprises, data is the new fuel. But the real challenge is not just collecting massive amounts of data—it’s making sense of it in real time. Traditional databases and storage architectures weren’t built for today’s AI and machine learning workloads, where speed, scalability, and security are non-negotiable. This is where VAST InsightEngine comes in, representing a game-changing approach to real-time data processing that’s built for the AI era.
The Challenge: Legacy Systems Weren’t Designed for Real-Time
Let’s take a step back to what we are solving for with the InsightEngine.
The fundamental problem is that legacy systems can’t scale while maintaining real-time performance—it’s always a tradeoff. This challenge isn’t limited to just databases; it applies to object stores, filesystems, data lakes, vector databases, and more, whether deployed on-prem or in the cloud.
In today’s world, data directly fuels insights, which in turn generate more data, creating a continuous flywheel of demand. However, legacy architectures struggle to keep up with this exponential data growth, forcing enterprises to make difficult choices.
In practice, this means organizations are forced to piece together multiple point solutions—one for high-capacity object storage, another for high-speed filesystems, a separate data lake for analytics, a vector database for AI workloads, a pipeline orchestration framework, and dedicated compute infrastructure.
Managing and balancing these disparate systems—while ensuring real-time performance—becomes an operational nightmare. And all of this happens while your primary focus should be on your business, not infrastructure management.
This is where VAST InsightEngine comes in, eliminating complexity and unlocking seamless real-time AI workflows.
The Solution: VAST InsightEngine – A Purpose-Built Platform for Enterprise AI
VAST InsightEngine is a real-time application workflow purpose-built for the modern era, designed to eliminate the complexity of fragmented solutions and enable seamless, real-time AI workflows.
Why InsightEngine?
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A One-Stop Shop for AI Workloads
InsightEngine is an easy-to-use, fully integrated platform that provides everything needed to run AI workloads in production—storage, database, compute, and AI pipelines—all in one place. -
Real-Time AI at Scale
With InsightEngine, data stays fresh and relevant, enabling interactive AI workflows with ultra-low latency. This ensures businesses can make decisions in real time without delays caused by traditional infrastructure. -
Exabyte-Scale, Multi-Format Support
Built for both structured and unstructured data, InsightEngine can scale seamlessly to exabytes of storage, supporting AI-driven vector search, graph analytics, and real-time data processing. -
Enterprise-Grade Security & Reliability
InsightEngine is built with the features that enterprises demand: robust security, audit logs, multi-tenancy, disaster recovery, resiliency, and high performance. It’s designed to meet the strictest governance and compliance requirements of the enterprise while maintaining speed and efficiency.
By consolidating multiple AI infrastructure components into a single, scalable, and intelligent platform, VAST InsightEngine redefines how enterprises harness data for AI-driven innovation.
Real-Time RAG Pipeline with InsightEngine
One of the most powerful use cases for InsightEngine is Real-Time Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The platform seamlessly integrates data ingestion, transformation, embedding, and retrieval, ensuring AI models work with the freshest data.
Step 1: Ingestion and Embedding
The ingestion pipeline runs online and in real-time. It leverages Inference Microservices for feature extraction, document chunking, and embedding generation.
- Files (e.g., PDFs) are stored in VAST DataStore
- Triggers initiate AI pipelines using VAST DataEngine & Runtime
- Data is processed with Inference models (OCR, VLM, chunking, embedding)
- Chunked and embedded data is stored in VAST Database for fast retrieval
Step 2: Retrieval and Contextualization
When a query is received, InsightEngine ensures optimized retrieval with contextual awareness.
- The user submits a prompt
- The retriever first contextualizes the query with its conversation history
- The retriever fetches relevant data, via vector similarity search
- Chunks are passed to a reranking model
- Finally, the retriever then passes a prompted, contextualized and ranked query to the LLM
- Final answer and supporting data with document sources are returned to the user
A Unified Data Platform with Built-in Unified Access Control
One of the most powerful aspects of VAST InsightEngine is that it combines a massively scalable database, vector database, and data store into a single platform. This unification eliminates the complexity of managing and mediating separate systems while enabling seamless and secure AI workloads.
A unique advantage of this approach is that access control policies enforced on the original source files are inherently preserved across all data representations and indexes. When performing vector search as part of the RAG retrieval process, InsightEngine ensures that users only receive vector embeddings corresponding to data chunks from files they are authorized to access. This means:
✅ Data security and governance are maintained—even when working with unstructured data and AI-driven retrieval.
✅ Sensitive data is automatically filtered out at the retrieval stage, ensuring that AI-generated insights always comply with enterprise access controls.
✅ There’s no need for external policy enforcement layers, reducing operational complexity and improving query efficiency, all in real-time.
By tightly integrating security, storage, database and AI retrieval, the InsightEngine ensures that AI-driven workflows remain both powerful and compliant, making it an enterprise-ready solution for real-time AI applications.
The Future: Pre-Packaged AI Workflows
VAST is working toward a future where InsightEngine will come with pre-packaged workflows for industries such as healthcare, finance, and research—handling documents, videos, genomics, and more.
With exabyte-scale capacity, real-time processing, and enterprise-grade security, VAST InsightEngine is the foundation for the next generation of AI-powered applications.
VAST InsightEngine in Action
I’m excited today to show a short InsightEngine demo from my colleague Andy Pernsteiner that may spark some ideas about how your organization can harness this tool to drive value across a range of use cases and business groups.
You can see the InsightEngine in action at the VAST booth during NVIDIA GTC 2025 next month in San Jose! Book a meeting with us today.
But you don’t need to wait until GTC to join the conversation on Cosmos, where AI practitioners around the world are discussing the InsightEngine and and other top trending AI topics. See you there!
