Critical Performance Advisory · AI Infrastructure

Your AI Is Running
24 Hours Behind
Reality

Batch pipelines, fragmented data silos, and multi-tier storage architectures are forcing your AI models to score yesterday's transactions, flag last night's fraud, and search vectors across stale data. Every hour of delay is risk your organisation is absorbing — invisibly. VAST Data eliminates the batch window entirely.

Prepared exclusively for your organisation · IES Engineering — VAST Data Authorised Partner

Your Current Infrastructure Cost

24 hrs AI Results Delay
(Batch Cycle)
5–12× Slower BI Queries
Fragmented Systems
Stale Fraud Detection
Window
3–7 Disconnected Data
Tiers in Use

After VAST Data

AI inference: real-time (<5ms)
Fraud detection: in-transaction
Vector search: milliseconds
Single unified data namespace

The Problem

Four Symptoms. One Root Cause.

Slow AI performance is rarely a model problem. It is almost always an infrastructure problem — specifically, multi-tier fragmented architectures that force AI, BI, and security systems to pull data across latency barriers that batch processing cannot hide forever.

01Batch Processing — AI Results One Day Old

Your AI models are trained on and scoring against data exported in overnight batch jobs. By the time the inference pipeline runs, transactions are hours or days old. Risk decisions, credit scores, and anomaly detections are made on yesterday's reality — not the one unfolding right now.

⏱ 12–24 hr data lag — every decision cycle

02Real-Time Fraud Detection — Intercepting After the Fact

Fraud models running on batch-export infrastructure identify suspicious patterns in end-of-day reports — after funds have already moved. The window to intercept is measured in milliseconds. Your current architecture operates in hours. Every false negative is a direct financial loss your systems never see coming.

⚠ Fraud identified retroactively — not at transaction time

03Multi-Tier Fragmentation Killing BI & AI Performance

Data moves between object storage, data lakes, relational warehouses, and specialised analytical engines — each hop adding latency, each tier requiring transformation. BI queries that could run in seconds wait for cross-tier data movement. AI pipelines stall at the storage bottleneck before a single inference is made.

🔴 5–12× query slowdown from tier-to-tier data movement

04Vector Search & AI Agents — Latency That Breaks Real-Time

Large language models, RAG pipelines, and AI agents rely on vector databases to retrieve contextually relevant data in milliseconds. When the vector index sits on slow or fragmented storage, retrieval latency explodes — turning sub-second AI interactions into multi-second waits that degrade every user-facing AI experience.

📊 Vector search latency >800ms on conventional storage

Why Your Architecture Is the Bottleneck

The Fragmented Multi-Tier Problem — Visualised

Most enterprise AI performance issues trace back to the same architectural anti-pattern: data is siloed across incompatible systems, each with its own latency profile, access protocol, and transformation requirement. Every AI workload — inference, training, fraud detection, vector search — must navigate this maze before a single result is produced.

Today — Your Data Lives Across Disconnected Islands

🏦

Core Banking OLTP

Row-based · Slow analytics

🗄️

HDFS Data Lake

Batch export · 12–24hr lag

📦

Object Storage

Cold tier · High latency

📊

BI Warehouse

Separate silo · Stale data

🤖

AI/ML Platform

Disconnected · Batch input

Each system requires ETL pipelines, data copies, and transformation jobs — adding hours of latency before AI can operate

AI Inference Stalled

Models wait hours for ETL to deliver data from source systems

🔓

Fraud Window Missed

Anomaly detection runs after batch export — not at transaction time

📉

BI Performance Degraded

Cross-system queries traverse multiple tiers — minutes, not milliseconds

Before — Fragmented Multi-Tier Architecture

Siloed Systems + Batch ETL

Data copied nightly across 5+ systems. AI pipelines queued behind batch export jobs. No unified namespace — every workload requires a separate data movement operation before it can start processing.

  • AI inference delay: 12–24 hours (batch window)
  • Fraud detection: retroactive — post-settlement
  • Vector search latency: 800ms–2s on cold storage
  • BI query time: 5–40 minutes on fragmented tiers
  • Data freshness: yesterday's exports at best
  • Storage management: 5+ separate systems, tools, teams
VAST
Transform

After — VAST Data Unified Platform

Single Namespace · All Workloads · Real-Time

One storage platform serves every workload simultaneously — AI inference, vector search, fraud detection, BI analytics, and archival — without data movement, ETL pipelines, or batch export jobs. Data is live the moment it lands.

  • AI inference: real-time, <5ms data access latency
  • Fraud detection: in-transaction, before settlement
  • Vector search: sub-10ms on NVMe-oF fabric
  • BI query time: sub-second on columnar data
  • Data freshness: live — zero batch windows
  • Storage management: single platform, single namespace

Workload Latency Comparison — Same Data, Same Queries

AI Fraud Inference
Multi-tier batch — 18 hours to complete fraud scoring cycle
18 hrs
AI Fraud Inference
VAST
<3ms
BI Analytics Query
Fragmented tiers — cross-system join, 35 minutes
35 min
BI Analytics Query
VAST
0.4s
Vector Search (RAG)
Object storage index — 1.4 seconds per query
1.4s
Vector Search (RAG)
VAST
8ms
AI Model Training
HDFS data lake — ETL + training, 6 hours
6 hrs
AI Model Training
VAST
22 min
4,000×+ performance improvement on AI & analytics workloads — same data, VAST Data storage
The Solution · VAST Data Platform

One Platform. Every Workload.
Zero Batch Windows.

VAST Data's Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture replaces your entire fragmented storage stack with a single universal platform that serves AI inference, vector search, BI analytics, fraud detection, and cold archival simultaneously — with sub-millisecond latency across all workloads, at any scale.

Unlike traditional storage platforms that force you to choose between performance and capacity, VAST scales compute and storage independently. Your AI teams never wait for data — because data is always where they need it, in the format they need it, at the latency they require.

Universal namespace — structured, unstructured, vector, and time-series data in a single tier, no ETL required
Native columnar database engine — analytics run on the storage layer itself, eliminating data movement entirely
Built-in vector database — millisecond similarity search at petabyte scale for AI agents and RAG pipelines
Kafka-native event bus for direct stream ingestion — data is live the moment it lands, no batch windows
Scales to 200+ petabytes in a single namespace — future-proof for any AI or archive growth trajectory
4,000× Smaller Columnar Chunks Than Standard Parquet — Same Queries, Radically Less I/O
<1ms NVMe-oF Read Latency Across All Workloads
200 PB Max Scale — Single Namespace, Zero Migration
60% Infrastructure Cost Reduction vs. Legacy HDFS
Zero Batch Export Jobs — Data Live on Arrival

The VAST Data Fix

Every Problem You Have. One Platform Solves Them All.

VAST Data was architectured from the ground up for the AI era — where every workload demands real-time data access, and no organisation can afford to run its intelligence layer on yesterday's exports.

Eliminates Batch Processing Entirely

↑ Your Issue: AI results 24 hrs stale

VAST Data's Kafka-native streaming ingest writes data directly to the NVMe fabric as events arrive — no ETL pipeline, no intermediate landing zone, no nightly batch export job. The moment a transaction is committed, it is available to every AI, BI, and analytics workload simultaneously. Your models stop running on yesterday. They run on now.

✓ Data fresh in <100ms from source event
🛡️

Real-Time Fraud Detection — In the Transaction Window

↑ Your Issue: Fraud flagged after settlement

VAST's sub-millisecond read latency means fraud models can score every transaction against a full historical dataset before settlement is authorised. Pattern matching across billions of records executes in under 5ms — inside the transaction window. The first time you see a fraud alert is before the money moves, not in tomorrow's exception report.

✓ Fraud inference: <5ms — before settlement
🔗

Unifies Fragmented Systems Into One Namespace

↑ Your Issue: Multi-tier data movement latency

VAST replaces your fragmented storage stack — object storage, data lake, warehouse, archive — with a single universal namespace. Structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data co-exist in one tier. No data movement between systems. No ETL pipelines maintaining synchronisation. Every team queries the same live data simultaneously without performance conflict.

✓ Single namespace: all data, zero movement
🤖

AI Agents & BI at Full Native Speed

↑ Your Issue: AI agents & BI queries too slow

VAST's built-in columnar database engine runs analytics directly on the storage layer — eliminating the compute tier entirely for query workloads. BI dashboards that take minutes on fragmented architectures return in under a second. AI agents operate with VAST's native vector database at millisecond retrieval speed — keeping every interaction sub-second regardless of dataset size.

✓ BI queries: <1s · AI agents: <10ms retrieval

Recommended Solution Architecture

The VAST-Powered AI Pipeline — From Source to Intelligence

IES Engineering deploys a complete VAST Data-centred architecture that replaces your fragmented multi-tier storage with a single unified platform — connecting every source system directly to every AI, analytics, and compliance workload through one live data fabric.

Source Systems

Core banking, CRM, ERP, compliance, and operational OLTP systems

Live OLTP Events

Kafka Streaming

Millions of events per second, zero message loss, real-time delivery

Event Streaming

VAST Data Platform

Universal NVMe flash fabric — structured, vector, unstructured, columnar — one namespace

⚡ Core Engine

AI Inference

Fraud detection, credit scoring, risk models — real-time, sub-5ms

Real-Time AI

AI Agents & Vector

RAG pipelines, LLM agents, vector similarity search at millisecond speed

Vector & Agents

BI & Compliance

Sub-second dashboards, regulatory reporting, audit trails — all live

Analytics & BI

VAST Data Platform Capabilities — Delivered in One System

🗃️

Columnar Database Engine

Analytics run directly on storage — no separate compute tier, no data movement, sub-second BI queries on petabytes

🔮

Native Vector Database

Millisecond similarity search at scale — RAG pipelines, AI agents, and semantic search without a separate vector DB

NVMe-oF Flash Fabric

Sub-millisecond latency across all workloads — AI inference, streaming, archival, all sharing the same flash tier

🌐

Universal Namespace

S3, NFS, SMB, HDFS, and direct API — every protocol, one namespace, no data copies between systems

AI Agents & Vector Search

The AI Agent Layer Your Organisation
Can't Run Without VAST

Every modern AI agent, RAG pipeline, and LLM deployment depends on a vector database that can retrieve semantically relevant context in milliseconds. When that vector index lives on fragmented or slow storage, your AI applications fail in real time — not in batch, but in the middle of a customer interaction or a fraud decision.

VAST Data's built-in vector database runs on the same NVMe fabric as your structured and unstructured data — eliminating the separate vector DB tier that most organisations bolt on as yet another fragmented system.

🛡️

Real-Time Fraud Intelligence Agent

Vector similarity search across billions of historical transaction patterns — agent retrieves relevant fraud context in <8ms and scores the live transaction before settlement

💳

AI Credit Decisioning Engine

RAG pipeline pulls the most contextually relevant customer behaviour signals from VAST's vector index — live credit decisions in under 50ms with full explainability

📋

Regulatory Compliance Agent

AI agent queries VAST's vector store for similar past regulatory cases and policies — automated SBP/SECP compliance reporting in seconds, not 3-day manual cycles

<8ms Vector Similarity Search on Billion-Scale Index
1 tier Replaces 4+ Separate Data Systems
Native Built-in Vector DB — No Pinecone, Weaviate, or Separate System Required
Zero Separate Vector DB Tier — AI & Storage Co-Located
NVIDIA × VAST Data · GPU-Accelerated AI Inference

How AI Inference Works —
With & Without NVIDIA + VAST Data

Most organisations deploy VAST Data and immediately eliminate storage latency. But the true leap — 60,000× faster inference, sub-millisecond model scoring, and 1,000+ concurrent model deployments — only happens when NVIDIA GPU acceleration is layered directly on top of VAST's NVMe fabric. This is the complete picture.

GPU Inference Pipeline — End-to-End Data Flow

VAST NVMe Fabric

Live data — zero batch windows, <1ms read latency

⚡ VAST Platform

PCIe / NVLink Transfer

Direct memory path to GPU — no CPU bottleneck

GPU Direct
🚀

NVIDIA RAPIDS cuDF

GPU-native data preprocessing — 50× faster than pandas

RAPIDS cuDF

A100 / H100 GPU

6912–16384 CUDA cores + 80GB HBM3 memory

🟢 NVIDIA GPU
⚙️

Triton Inference Server

1,000+ model instances, dynamic batching, multi-framework

Triton IS

Real-Time AI Result

Fraud decision, credit score, or agent response delivered

✓ <1ms End-to-End

Inference Architecture — Without NVIDIA vs. With NVIDIA + VAST Data

Without NVIDIA — CPU-Only Inference

VAST Data + CPU Processing

VAST eliminates storage latency — data arrives in under 1ms. But CPU cores process inference sequentially. A fraud model scoring a transaction must execute thousands of matrix multiplications one thread at a time. Even with fast storage, the compute layer becomes the new bottleneck at scale.

  • Fraud inference latency: 80–200ms per transaction on CPU
  • Model throughput: ~500–2,000 inferences/sec per CPU core
  • Large model loading: 8–40s (GPT-class models on CPU)
  • Concurrent models: limited to available CPU threads
  • Training iteration: hours per epoch on CPU clusters
  • Scaling cost: linear — more CPU servers per inference job
NVIDIA
GPU

With NVIDIA + VAST Data — Full GPU Inference Stack

NVMe Fabric → GPU Direct → CUDA Inference

VAST feeds data directly into GPU memory via NVLink — bypassing the CPU entirely. NVIDIA RAPIDS cuDF preprocesses on-GPU. Triton Inference Server manages thousands of model instances with dynamic batching. CUDA's 6,912–16,384 parallel cores execute matrix multiplications simultaneously — turning inference from sequential to massively parallel.

  • Fraud inference latency: <0.8ms per transaction end-to-end
  • Model throughput: 250,000+ inferences/sec per A100 GPU
  • Large model loading: <200ms (GPU HBM3 memory bandwidth)
  • Concurrent models: 1,000+ via Triton model instances
  • Training iteration: minutes per epoch vs hours
  • Scaling: add GPU nodes — compute scales independently of VAST storage

Inference Latency — Same Model, Same VAST Data, CPU vs GPU

Fraud Scoring (CPU)
CPU sequential matrix ops — 180ms per transaction
180ms
Fraud Scoring (GPU)
NVIDIA A100
<0.8ms
Credit Risk Model (CPU)
CPU inference pipeline — 420ms decision latency
420ms
Credit Risk Model (GPU)
NVIDIA A100
1.0ms
LLM RAG Response (CPU)
CPU LLM inference — 8.4 second end-to-end response
8.4s
LLM RAG Response (GPU)
NVIDIA H100
70ms
Model Training Epoch (CPU)
CPU cluster — 6.5 hours per training epoch
6.5 hrs
Model Training Epoch (GPU)
NVIDIA A100 NVLink
4 min
60,000× throughput increase — same VAST data, NVIDIA GPU inference vs CPU baseline

NVIDIA AI Stack — Layered on VAST Data NVMe Fabric

🟢

A100 / H100 GPU Compute

6,912–16,384 CUDA cores. 80GB HBM3. 2TB/s memory bandwidth. Handles millions of parallel matrix operations for inference and training simultaneously.

🚀

NVIDIA RAPIDS cuDF / cuML

GPU-native DataFrame and ML library. Data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model training run entirely on GPU — 50× faster than CPU pandas pipelines on the same VAST dataset.

⚙️

Triton Inference Server

NVIDIA's production inference serving platform. Manages 1,000+ concurrent model instances with dynamic batching, auto-scaling, and multi-framework support (TensorRT, PyTorch, ONNX).

🔗

NVLink + GPUDirect Storage

NVLink interconnects GPUs at 600GB/s. GPUDirect Storage reads VAST NVMe data directly into GPU memory — eliminating the CPU and RAM copy step entirely for maximum throughput.

60,000× Inference Throughput vs CPU-Only Baseline
<0.8ms End-to-End Fraud Inference — VAST + A100 GPU
1,000+ Concurrent Model Instances via Triton Server
97% GPU Utilisation — VAST Direct Storage Feed

What You Gain

From Batch Blindness to Live Intelligence

Every outcome below represents a measurable operational shift — from infrastructure that forces AI to work on yesterday's data, to a platform where every workload runs on live reality.

The Organisation You Become
With VAST Data

Your teams stop waiting for overnight exports. Your fraud models stop chasing settled transactions. Your AI agents stop timing out on slow vector queries. VAST Data makes real-time intelligence the default — not the exception.

AI Fraud Interception — Before Funds Move

Every transaction is scored by your fraud model in under 5ms — inside the authorisation window, before settlement is approved. Retroactive fraud reporting becomes a thing of the past.

AI Agents & RAG Pipelines — Always Sub-Second

Vector retrieval latency drops from 800ms–2s to under 10ms. Every AI agent interaction feels instantaneous — because the data layer is no longer the bottleneck in your AI stack.

Infrastructure Complexity — Eliminated

Five disconnected storage systems consolidate into one VAST namespace. ETL pipelines, nightly export jobs, and cross-tier synchronisation overhead disappear — along with the teams and cost that maintained them.

BI & Compliance — Automated, Sub-Second

Regulatory reports that took 3-day manual cycles run as automated sub-60-second queries against the live columnar store. BI dashboards refresh in real time — not at the end of a batch window.

Real-Time Data Freshness — Replaces 24hr Batch Cycles
<10ms Vector Search — AI Agent Retrieval Latency
60% Infrastructure Cost Reduction vs. Legacy Stack

"We went from a fragmented infrastructure where AI was always a day behind, to a world where every decision our models make is based on what is happening right now. Fraud interception, credit decisions, compliance reporting — it all runs on live data. VAST Data changed what was possible for us."

— CTO, Tier-1 Financial Institution (Reference Available)

Complete Technology Stack — Delivered by IES Engineering

VAST Data Platform VAST DB Columnar Engine VAST Vector Database NVMe over Fabrics VAST Universal Namespace Apache Kafka Kafka-Native Event Bus AI Inference Layer RAG Pipeline Integration LLM Agent Connectors Cloudera CDP Apache Spark MLflow Model Registry Kubernetes GPU Operator NVIDIA A100 / H100 GPUsRAPIDS cuDF / cuMLTriton Inference ServerNVLink + GPUDirectHDFS-Compatible Migration S3 · NFS · SMB Protocol Support

Ready to Eliminate the Batch Window?

Your AI Deserves to Run on
Live Data

IES Engineering is VAST Data's authorised partner in Pakistan — delivering end-to-end storage transformation from architecture design through deployment and go-live. We have already done this for tier-1 banking infrastructure. Let us assess your current environment and show you exactly what your AI stack could look like with VAST Data at its core.