Senior Solutions Engineer

Cloudera and VAST Data take aim at GPU starvation with joint AI factory stack. by Harold Fritts on July 15, 2026 Cloudera and VAST Data have entered into a partnership to build a unified AI factory architecture for enterprises running continuous AI training, inference, and analytics workloads. The joint offering combines Cloudera's containerized data services with the VAST AI Operating System, targeting a problem that has become increasingly common in enterprise AI deployments: expensive GPU clusters sitting idle while they wait on data. That idle-GPU problem, often called GPU starvation, tends to show up when organizations bolt AI workloads onto data architectures that were never built for the continuous, high-throughput demands of modern AI pipelines. Data preparation, training, inference, and analytics all compete for the same infrastructure, and when the data layer can't keep pace, the accelerators stall. Cloudera and VAST are positioning their combined stack as a fix for that bottleneck, aiming to keep GPUs fed with low-latency data throughout the full AI lifecycle. How the architecture is built. On the Cloudera side, the company brings its lakehouse architecture, which packages data engineering, streaming, analytics, machine learning, and AI services into portable containers that can run across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. That gives customers a consistent operational model regardless of where the workload actually executes. VAST contributes its Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture as the underlying data infrastructure, scaling to exabyte levels while integrating vector database services with NVIDIA cuVS for GPU-accelerated vector indexing and search. The VAST AI OS is built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design and is designed to take latent enterprise data and turn it into an AI-ready state that can be consumed directly by training and inference pipelines. Cloudera then layers its data engineering, governance, and AI services on top of that foundation. The combined stack is meant to cover the full path from raw data ingestion through model deployment, with consistent operations across data centers, private cloud, and public cloud. Cloudera and VAST say the architecture eliminates GPU starvation through high-bandwidth, low-latency data pipelines, which should, in turn, improve sustained GPU utilization and compute efficiency. The platform is also built to handle structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets at scale, with enterprise governance and compliance controls intended for private and sovereign AI deployments. NVIDIA integration and inference. The partnership leans heavily on NVIDIA's stack. Alongside the AI Data Platform reference design underpinning VAST's AI OS, the companies are integrating NVIDIA AI Enterprise software into the joint architecture. Cloudera's AI Inference Service uses NVIDIA NIM microservices to enable organizations to deploy and scale models directly on their own data, including NVIDIA's newer Nemotron open models. On the data engineering side, customers can accelerate Apache Spark workloads using NVIDIA cuDF, which integrates transparently with Cloudera Data Engineering. That allows Spark jobs to tap into VAST's high-throughput data services with GPU-accelerated processing, which should help on data-heavy stages of AI pipelines rather than just training and inference. For regulated industries in particular, Cloudera and VAST are framing this as a "silicon-to-application" solution, covering everything from the underlying NVIDIA hardware and software up through production AI applications, deployable on-premises or in the cloud depending on data residency and compliance requirements. Availability. The companies say the partnership combines 60 exabytes of customer-managed data across their installed bases, giving both vendors a large pool of existing enterprise customers to target as demand for private AI infrastructure grows. The joint Cloudera-VAST AI factory solution is available now through both companies' enterprise sales teams and partner networks. Cloudera and VAST plan to expand the portfolio through 2026 with additional reference architectures, validated deployment patterns, and industry-specific solutions. Engage with StorageReview Harold Fritts. I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.

Cloudera and VAST Data launch unified AI Factory for hybrid Enterprise AI. July 14, 2026 Press play to listen to this content SAN JOSE, Calif., July 14, 2026 - Cloudera today announced a strategic partnership with VAST Data to deliver a unified AI factory, a scalable production environment where data is continuously ingested, refined, governed, and delivered to AI models for training and inference. This infrastructure is available for enterprises operating across on-premises environments and public clouds, enabling a consistent AI operating model while allowing organizations to deploy AI services wherever performance, compliance and cost requirements are best met. The collaboration integrates Cloudera's next-generation containerized data services with the VAST AI Operating System - which unifies high-performance storage, database, and global namespace capabilities to power large-scale AI, analytics, and mission-critical data workloads. This data-platform layer, based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, turns latent enterprise data into AI-ready data that fuels the AI factory. As organizations race to deploy generative and agentic AI, many are discovering that traditional architectures were not designed to support continuous AI pipelines spanning data preparation, training, inference, and analytics. One consequence is GPU starvation, where expensive accelerator clusters sit idle waiting for data. The joint solution addresses this challenge by ensuring data can move efficiently through the AI lifecycle while keeping GPUs continuously fed with high-throughput, low-latency data, dramatically improving utilization, performance, and return on investment. Building the Enterprise AI Factory Cloudera's lakehouse architecture provides portable, containerized data services, including data engineering, streaming, analytics, machine learning, and AI, all deployable consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VAST's Disaggregated Shared Everything architecture serves as the foundation of the VAST AI Operating System, delivering exabyte-scale data infrastructure, integrating vector database services with NVIDIA cuVS for GPU-accelerated vector indexing and search, and high-performance storage optimized for modern GPU clusters and AI workloads. Together, VAST's AI OS leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, with NVIDIA-accelerated computing, transforms latent enterprise data into activated AI-ready data, while Cloudera delivers data engineering, analytics, governance, and AI services on top. Together, the companies deliver: * A unified AI factory architecture from raw data ingestion to model deployment * Consistent operations anywhere across data centers, private cloud, and public cloud * Elimination of GPU starvation through ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency data pipelines * Significantly improved compute efficiency by ensuring GPUs operate at sustained utilization levels * Superior storage performance at scale for structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets * Secure private AI environments with enterprise governance and compliance This architecture enables organizations to move from isolated AI experiments to production-grade AI systems that continuously transform enterprise data into actionable intelligence for training, inference, analytics, and agentic applications. This partnership also furthers solutions that create private AI factories by combining NVIDIA AI infrastructure, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the VAST AI OS as the foundational data platform and enterprise data and AI services from Cloudera into an optimized solution for private and sovereign AI. The Cloudera AI Inference Service, as one of the solutions, accelerated by NVIDIA NIM microservices, enables organizations to bring AI to their data where they can deploy and scale any model, including the latest NVIDIA Nemotron open models. Customers will be able to accelerate Apache Spark workloads with NVIDIA cuDF to transparently accelerate Cloudera Data Engineering workloads by allowing Spark jobs to leverage VAST's high-throughput data services via GPU-accelerated processing, supporting even more AI workload optimization. For large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries, this represents a full "silicon-to-application" solution for building production-grade AI systems, anywhere. Driving Significant Mutual Growth The partnership combines 60 exabytes worth of customer-managed data, unlocking substantial new opportunities for both companies and their customers. This is coupled with an increasing enterprise demand for private AI infrastructure, creating a significant pipeline and future revenue growth opportunities. "Enterprises are investing billions in GPUs, yet many struggle to achieve full utilization due to data bottlenecks," said Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer & GM, Applied AI at Cloudera. "Our partnership with VAST eliminates GPU starvation and enables customers to build true AI factories - where data flows seamlessly from ingestion to insight." "Most enterprises already have the data they need for AI. The challenge is unlocking the value in data to create a continuous pipeline of AI inference, fine-tuning, and data analysis to build the next generation of intelligent applications," said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. "Together, Cloudera and VAST are helping customers build AI factories that connect data, intelligence, and infrastructure into a single operational platform for AI across hybrid environments." The joint Cloudera-VAST AI factory solution is available immediately through both companies' enterprise sales teams and partner ecosystems. Reference architectures, validated deployment patterns, and industry-specific solutions will continue to expand throughout 2026. About Cloudera Cloudera is the only hybrid data and AI platform company that large organizations trust to bring AI to their data anywhere it lives. Unlike other providers, Cloudera delivers a consistent cloud experience that converges public clouds, on-prem data centers, and the edge, leveraging a proven open-source foundation. As the pioneer in big data, Cloudera empowers businesses to apply AI and assert control over 100% of their data, in all forms, improving security, governance, and real-time and predictive insights. The world's largest brands across all industries rely on Cloudera to transform decision-making and ultimately boost bottom lines, safeguard against threats, and save lives. About VAST Data VAST Data is the AI Operating System company - powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST's breakthrough DASE architecture - the world's first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience - VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI.

Cloudera and VAST Data announce strategic partnership to deliver AI Data Platform anywhere. Combining Cloudera's next-generation lakehouse data services with VAST's AI Operating System, leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, this joint solution eliminates GPU starvation and accelerates enterprise AI San Jose, California - July 14, 2026: Cloudera, the only company bringing AI to data anywhere, today announced a strategic partnership with VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, to deliver a unified AI factory, a scalable production environment where data is continuously ingested, refined, governed, and delivered to AI models for training and inference. This infrastructure is available for enterprises operating across on-premises environments and public clouds, enabling a consistent AI operating model while allowing organizations to deploy AI services wherever performance, compliance and cost requirements are best met. The collaboration integrates Cloudera's next-generation containerized data services with the VAST AI Operating System - which unifies high-performance storage, database, and global namespace capabilities to power large-scale AI, analytics, and mission-critical data workloads. This data-platform layer, based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, turns latent enterprise data into AI-ready data that fuels the AI factory. As organizations race to deploy generative and agentic AI, many are discovering that traditional architectures were not designed to support continuous AI pipelines spanning data preparation, training, inference, and analytics. One consequence is GPU starvation, where expensive accelerator clusters sit idle waiting for data. The joint solution addresses this challenge by ensuring data can move efficiently through the AI lifecycle while keeping GPUs continuously fed with high-throughput, low-latency data, dramatically improving utilization, performance, and return on investment. Building the enterprise AI factory. Cloudera's lakehouse architecture provides portable, containerized data services, including data engineering, streaming, analytics, machine learning, and AI, all deployable consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VAST's Disaggregated Shared Everything architecture serves as the foundation of the VAST AI Operating System, delivering exabyte-scale data infrastructure, integrating vector database services with NVIDIA cuVS for GPU-accelerated vector indexing and search, and high-performance storage optimized for modern GPU clusters and AI workloads. Together, VAST's AI OS leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, with NVIDIA-accelerated computing, transforms latent enterprise data into activated AI-ready data, while Cloudera delivers data engineering, analytics, governance, and AI services on top. Together, the companies deliver: * A unified AI factory architecture from raw data ingestion to model deployment * Consistent operations anywhere across data centers, private cloud, and public cloud * Elimination of GPU starvation through ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency data pipelines * Significantly improved compute efficiency by ensuring GPUs operate at sustained utilization levels * Superior storage performance at scale for structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets * Secure private AI environments with enterprise governance and compliance This architecture enables organizations to move from isolated AI experiments to production-grade AI systems that continuously transform enterprise data into actionable intelligence for training, inference, analytics, and agentic applications. This partnership also furthers solutions that create private AI factories by combining NVIDIA AI infrastructure, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the VAST AI OS as the foundational data platform and enterprise data and AI services from Cloudera into an optimized solution for private and sovereign AI. The Cloudera AI Inference Service, as one of the solutions, accelerated by NVIDIA NIM microservices, enables organizations to bring AI to their data where they can deploy and scale any model, including the latest NVIDIA Nemotron open models. Customers will be able to accelerate Apache Spark workloads with NVIDIA cuDF to transparently accelerate Cloudera Data Engineering workloads by allowing Spark jobs to leverage VAST's high-throughput data services via GPU-accelerated processing, supporting even more AI workload optimization. For large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries, this represents a full "silicon-to-application" solution for building production-grade AI systems, anywhere. Driving significant mutual growth. The partnership combines 60 exabytes worth of customer-managed data, unlocking substantial new opportunities for both companies and their customers. This is coupled with an increasing enterprise demand for private AI infrastructure, creating a significant pipeline and future revenue growth opportunities. "Enterprises are investing billions in GPUs, yet many struggle to achieve full utilization due to data bottlenecks," said Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer & GM, Applied AI at Cloudera. "Our partnership with VAST eliminates GPU starvation and enables customers to build true AI factories - where data flows seamlessly from ingestion to insight." "Most enterprises already have the data they need for AI. The challenge is unlocking the value in data to create a continuous pipeline of AI inference, fine-tuning, and data analysis to build the next generation of intelligent applications," said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. "Together, Cloudera and VAST are helping customers build AI factories that connect data, intelligence, and infrastructure into a single operational platform for AI across hybrid environments." The joint Cloudera-VAST AI factory solution is available immediately through both companies' enterprise sales teams and partner ecosystems. Reference architectures, validated deployment patterns, and industry-specific solutions will continue to expand throughout 2026. To learn more, visit its VAST partnership page or register for its upcoming global event series, EVOLVE26 to learn how enterprises are unlocking greater value from their data, analytics, and AI initiatives. About Cloudera Cloudera is the only hybrid data and AI platform company that large organizations trust to bring AI to their data anywhere it lives. Unlike other providers, Cloudera delivers a consistent cloud experience that converges public clouds, on-prem data centers, and the edge, leveraging a proven open-source foundation. As the pioneer in big data, Cloudera empowers businesses to apply AI and assert control over 100% of their data, in all forms, improving security, governance, and real-time and predictive insights. The world's largest brands across all industries rely on Cloudera to transform decision-making and ultimately boost bottom lines, safeguard against threats, and save lives. To learn more, visit Cloudera.com and follow Cloudera Navigator on LinkedIn and X. (C) 2026 Cloudera and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cloudera, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. About VAST Data VAST Data is the AI Operating System company - powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST's breakthrough DASE architecture - the world's first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience - VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI. Learn more at vastdata.com and follow VAST Data on LinkedIn, YouTube and X. Ready to Get Started?