Article written and contributed by, VAST Data.
As artificial intelligence moves from a promising technology to a core business driver, organizations face a critical challenge: unlocking the value of their own proprietary data. Enterprises struggle to use their vast, siloed data stores for AI due to complex integration, security risks, and performance bottlenecks. The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA provides a groundbreaking solution, a full-stack, enterprise-ready infrastructure designed to transform your data into intelligence. At the data cornerstone of this solution is the VAST Data Platform, unifying your data for the new era of agentic AI.
A Trusted Foundation for Agentic AI
The primary goal of enterprise AI is to create sophisticated, agentic applications that can reason and act on an organization's internal knowledge base. However, this is nearly impossible when data is fragmented across legacy infrastructure. The Cisco Secure AI Factory directly addresses this by bringing together best-in-class technologies into a single, easy-to-deploy solution. It combines Cisco's powerful compute and networking, NVIDIA's accelerated computing and AI Enterprise software, and the VAST Data Platform to provide a seamless bridge between your data and AI-driven outcomes. This allows organizations to finally build and deploy trusted AI applications using their most valuable asset: their data.
The VAST Data Platform serves as the resilient and performant data foundation for the Cisco Secure AI Factory. Its unique Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture was built for the scale and performance that AI workloads demand, eliminating the data silos that traditionally hinder AI initiatives. Key capabilities include:
- Unifying Data: The platform consolidates structured and unstructured data, making all of your enterprise information available for AI model training and inference.
- Powering RAG Pipelines: With the integrated VAST InsightEngine, as part of the VAST AI Operating System, organizations can build sophisticated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, allowing AI applications to retrieve the most contextually relevant information from your proprietary data in real time.
- Performance at Scale: VAST delivers the extreme performance needed for every stage of the AI data lifecycle, from data preparation and training to high-speed inference, ensuring that GPU resources are always saturated and never waiting for data.
Unlocking Enterprise Data, Securely and at Scale
Security is the most significant barrier to enterprise AI adoption. The Cisco Secure AI Factory is designed with a security-first approach, where Cisco secures the entire AI stack from the network to the data center. This integrated security posture gives organizations the confidence to train models on sensitive internal data without fear of exposure. By providing a pre-validated, full-stack solution, the AI Factory removes the complexity and risk of building high-performance AI infrastructure from scratch, enabling organizations to focus on innovation instead of integration.
Before making a strategic investment in AI infrastructure, organizations need to validate performance, security, and integration with their unique workloads. The partnership between WWT and VAST provides the perfect environment to de-risk this transformation. By leveraging WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC), enterprises can test the complete Cisco Secure AI Factory solution under real-world conditions.
This powerful collaboration allows your teams to:
- Validate and benchmark AI workloads on a pre-integrated, enterprise-grade stack.
- Build and test secure RAG pipelines using your data in a safe, isolated sandbox environment.
- Optimize performance and ensure seamless integration before a full-scale deployment.
The WWT and VAST partnership empowers organizations to adopt AI with greater speed, confidence, and success.
The Future of Enterprise AI is Here
The era of complex, piecemeal AI infrastructure is giving way to simplified, turnkey solutions. The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, powered by the VAST Data Platform, provides the secure, scalable, and high-performance foundation needed to lead in the age of AI. It's a solution that finally unlocks the full potential of your enterprise data, enabling the next wave of agentic AI innovation.
To take the next step, connect with your WWT representative to see how you can test this solution in the Advanced Technology Center.