VAST unveils NVIDIA data centre architecture

Author: Isha Jain

VAST Data has unveiled a new AI cloud architecture designed to deliver unprecedented levels of performance, quality of service, zero-trust security, and space/cost/power efficiency for the AI factory. Building on NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU) technology, the company’s parallel system architecture makes it possible to disaggregate the entirety of its operating system natively into AI computing machinery, transforming supercomputers into AI data engines.

The NVIDIA BlueField networking platform combines robust compute power and integrated hardware accelerators to create secure and software-defined accelerated computing infrastructure for AI. By outfitting each graphics processing unit (GPU) server with a dedicated NVIDIA BlueField DPU running a stateless container that powers the VAST parallel services operating system, this new architecture design embeds storage and database processing services directly into AI servers and delivers true linear data services designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of GPUs. Moreover, by removing multiple layers of x86 hardware and networking from VAST’s network-attached data platform infrastructure, this new AI factory architecture dramatically reduces the cost, footprint, and power associated with AI data services.

Through its collaboration with NVIDIA and this integration, VAST Data is: 

• Maximising data centre efficiency: VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared Everything (DASE) architecture leverages the processing power of NVIDIA BlueField-3 to require less independent compute and networking resources, reducing the power usage and data centre footprint for VAST infrastructure by 70%. The combined end-to-end solution results in a net energy consumption savings of over 5%, compared to deploying NVIDIA-powered supercomputers with the previous VAST distributed data services infrastructure. 

• Enabling quality of service: By providing each GPU server with a dedicated and truly parallel storage and database container, this new AI factory architecture eliminates contention for data services infrastructure. VAST’s DASE architecture features extreme parallelism such that each NVIDIA BlueField-3 can read and write into shared namespaces of the platform without coordinating IO across containers. In essence, this architecture eliminates infrastructure contention at the most fundamental level. This contention-less architecture is essential for multi-tenant service providers who need to meet the contractual service level objectives of their clients, while also maximising the utilisation of all GPU computing assets.

• Enhancing zero-trust security: This new AI factory architecture ensures that data and data management remain protected and isolated from host operating systems. Compared to AI computers that use parallel file system clients (which have an intimate understanding of the data services layer), VAST is able to eliminate many attack vectors in a multi-tenant environment by hosting industry-standard network attached services, object services, and database services from NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs via standard client protocols that do not expose the underlying data platform system topology such as NFS, SMB, S3 and Apache Arrow.

• Delivering block storage services: VAST systems, powered by the NVIDIA DOCA software framework that enables the rapid development of containerised services, now provides block storage services natively to host operating systems, combining with VAST’s file, object, and database services to provide a comprehensive set of data presentations to high-performance applications.