White Paper

Choosing the Right Storage for Modern Workloads

From autonomous agents to biomedical breakthroughs, today's most demanding AI workloads depend on mining intelligence from vast pools of unstructured data. High-performance storage is necessary, but it isn't sufficient on its own. Training runs spanning thousands of GPUs, retrieval-augmented pipelines, and agents that loop through tools and shared state all need a single, high-throughput data plane that every GPU, container, and analytics engine can hit at once.

Some architectures were designed for that. Others were designed for render farms and home directories, and are showing the strain. See how four AI storage architectures actually compare, and why shared-nothing scale-out hits a ceiling that doesn't have to be yours.

Choosing the Right Storage for Modern Workloads

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Why VAST

Where the Architecture Actually Differs

Lower overhead 3% vs. up to 50%

Shared-nothing platforms can run data protection overhead as high as 35–50%. VAST's N+4 protection runs as low as 3%. That's the capacity you get to keep.

One namespace. Files and objects, together.

Splitting files and objects into separate namespaces complicates every multi-protocol AI pipeline. VAST serves both from a single namespace.

Independent scaling

Shared-nothing ties compute and capacity to every node. Need more throughput, and you're buying drives you didn't ask for. VAST's DASE architecture decouples them.

A database and pipeline engine, native

No separate database layer. No third-party pipeline tooling. VAST DataBase and DataEngine run on the same data plane as your storage.