November 19, 2025 — Leads & Copy —
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – VAST Data, an AI operating system company, unveiled a collaboration with Microsoft at Microsoft Ignite today, aimed at empowering the next evolution of agentic AI. The VAST AI OS, soon available to Azure customers, offers a streamlined approach to deploying scalable AI infrastructure within the cloud.
Enterprises gain access to VAST’s suite of data services on Azure, encompassing unified storage, data cataloging, and database capabilities to facilitate intricate AI workflows. This integration seeks to provide organizations with seamless data management across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, furnishing the required scale, intelligence, and automation to expedite AI innovation.
The VAST AI Operating System, running on Azure infrastructure, enables customers to deploy and operate it with familiar tools, governance, security measures, and billing systems. This setup is designed to ensure unified management, consistent performance, and reliability synonymous with Azure.
Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data, stated that the collaboration with Microsoft aligns with their shared vision for the future of AI infrastructure, emphasizing the convergence of performance, scale, and simplicity. He noted that becoming an Azure Partner signifies the initial step in this venture, allowing customers to unify data and AI pipelines across environments with the expected power, simplicity, and performance from VAST, enhanced by the reach, elasticity, and reliability of Microsoft’s cloud.
VAST’s AI Operating System on Azure enables customers to:
- Leverage Agentic AI: Utilizing VAST InsightEngine and AgentEngine for running intelligent, data-driven workflows directly where data resides. InsightEngine facilitates high-performance compute and database services, accelerating vector search, RAG pipelines, and data preparation. AgentEngine orchestrates autonomous agents operating on real-time data streams, enabling continuous AI reasoning across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Achieve Performance at Scale: VAST AI OS is designed for model training and inference, keeping Azure GPU and CPU clusters saturated with high-throughput data services, intelligent caching, and metadata-optimized I/O for consistent performance from pilot to multi-region scale. VAST benefits from the Laos VM Series and Azure Boost Accelerated Networking.
- Facilitate Seamless Hybrid AI Workflows: An exabyte-scale DataSpace creates a unified global namespace, eliminating data silos and enabling data mobility. Customers can transition from on-premises to Azure for GPU-accelerated workloads without migration or reconfiguration.
- Ensure Unified Data Access: VAST’s DataStore supports file (NFS, SMB), object (S3), and block protocols, while the VAST DataBase combines transactional performance with the query speed of a warehouse and the economics of a data lake, allowing diverse workloads to run on one platform.
- Adopt Elastic, Cost-Efficient Architecture: VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) design allows independent scaling of compute and storage resources within Azure, minimizing storage footprint and reducing cost for large-scale AI infrastructure.
Aung Oo, Vice President, Azure Storage at Microsoft, said that VAST’s AI Operating System running on Azure will provide customers with a high-performance, scalable platform built on the Laos VM Series using Azure Boost, seamlessly extending on-premises AI pipelines into Azure’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure. He added that many AI model builders leverage VAST for its scalability, performance, and AI-native capabilities, and this collaboration can help mutual customers streamline operations, reduce costs, and accelerate time-to-insight for AI workloads of every size.
As Microsoft invests in the future of AI infrastructure, VAST will work with the Azure team to align on next-generation platform requirements, positioning VAST as a strategic element of Microsoft’s AI computing strategy to unlock the potential of emerging innovations. Together, the companies aim to ensure that future AI systems are fueled by an AI operating system built for scale, performance, and simplicity.
Renen Hallak, VAST Data Founder and CEO, will be at Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco and Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis to discuss the collaboration.
Contact: Austin Weedfall, press@vastdata.com
Source: VAST Data
