Moments after the opening keynote for VAST Forward, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight set the stage from the company’s first-ever customer conference – a milestone moment for a 10-year-old company aiming to evolve from storage disruptor into something far more ambitious. With roughly 1,200 attendees and a partner lineup that reads like an AI infrastructure roll call – including Cisco, HPE, CoreWeave, Nebius, Lambda and Crusoe – Vellante and Knight frame VAST’s bet on a universal, software-based data platform built to serve AI at scale, across formats and across environments.

Vellante and Knight dig into what it really means to call VAST the “AI Operating System”: not a metaphor, but a claim about orchestrating data, security and IO as agentic systems move from demos to enterprise ROI. They also surface the harder questions emerging alongside the buildout – from zero-trust expectations and auditability to how humans will adapt when “agents per employee” becomes a real operating model. The result is a clear-eyed look at where AI infrastructure is heading, and why trust, transparency and platform architecture may determine who wins the next phase.

In this segment from VAST Forward 2026, John Mao, vice president of business development and alliances at VAST Data, joins theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante to discuss VAST’s evolution into a comprehensive AI operating system. Mao explains how VAST is building a strategic alliance ecosystem that bridges the gap between hardware and applications to serve as the foundational layer for the modern AI lifecycle. A major highlight of the discussion is the native integration with CrowdStrike, which brings best-in-class cybersecurity directly into the VAST pipeline to secure data access and manage the emerging security risks associated with autonomous AI agents.

The conversation also explores VAST’s partnership with TwelveLabs, a frontier model company specializing in video and computer vision. Mao details how this collaboration enables industries beyond media and entertainment, such as finance and retail, to extract real-time insights from video assets for fraud prevention and customer analytics. Additionally, Mao shares the expansion of the Cosmos community, which has grown from a developer forum into a robust ecosystem of channel and technology partners. By providing open-source blueprints and fostering deep collaboration, VAST aims to simplify the complexity of AI infrastructure and accelerate enterprise-wide adoption.

In this interview from VAST Forward, Jonsi Stefansson, general manager of cloud at VAST Data, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight to discuss how AI is dismantling traditional assumptions about cloud architecture. Stefansson highlights the inefficiencies of "lift and shift" models and explains how VAST’s Polaris acts as an intelligent abstraction layer and global namespace. He reveals how organizations can drastically reduce data fragmentation – moving from dozens of redundant copies to a streamlined, manageable footprint across edge, on-premises and cloud environments.

The conversation explores how VAST is solving modern supply chain challenges by intelligently matching data to available GPU compute power across different regions. Stefansson breaks down the technical advantages of the VAST AI Operating System, including its ability to vectorize unstructured data on the fly and consolidate the entire AI pipeline into a single platform. From eliminating egress-cost hurdles to delivering significant data reduction ratios, the discussion underscores how VAST is enabling enterprises to build more efficient, flexible and cost-effective AI factories.

In this interview from VAST Forward, Randy Hayes, vice president of VAST Data, joins Rob Linger, vice president of information advantage practice at Leidos, and Josh Salmanson, vice president of cyber defensive practice at Leidos, to talk with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante about the critical intersection of cybersecurity and AI ROI. The experts analyze a shifting threat landscape where adversaries now breach environments in under 30 seconds, far outpacing traditional defensive alerting systems. Salmanson explains why modern security has evolved into a complex data science problem, requiring the ability to process over 100 billion events per week to close the gap between detection and response.

The conversation explores how VAST Data and Leidos are collaborating to eliminate "tool bloat" by consolidating disparate security products into a unified AI operating system. Linger introduces the "Calibrated Trust Framework," a strategic model designed to govern autonomous AI agents and ensure auditable, responsible deployments within national security environments. By leveraging GPU-based architectures and VAST’s disaggregated shared-everything architecture (DASE), the panel highlights how organizations can transition from reactive defense to proactive hunting and achieve "mean time to know" at machine speed.

In this interview from VAST Forward in Salt Lake City, Phil Manez, vice president of go-to-market execution at VAST Data, and Ace Stryker, director of AI and ecosystem marketing at Solidigm, join theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight to unpack a supply shock most enterprises can’t ignore: a flash and memory crunch being accelerated by AI. Manez argues the demand curve isn’t behaving like a normal cycle – it’s being rewritten by inference at scale, where new applications and agentic workflows keep generating fresh data and chewing through capacity faster than suppliers can forecast.

Stryker explains that this isn’t a typical boom-and-bust cycle. AI inference is driving sustained demand – from RAG vectorization to larger context windows and KV cache requirements – and new fabs take years and billions of dollars to build. The conversation then shifts to solutions, including how the VAST Amplify program and its Disaggregated Shared-Everything Architecture (DASE) help customers get more out of existing flash through lower protection overhead and advanced data reduction, enabling them to extend scarce NAND capacity while continuing to scale AI initiatives.

In this exclusive interview, Danny McGinniss, vice president of product management for Cisco’s Compute Business Unit, and John Mao, vice president of business development and alliances at VAST Data, join theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight to unpack why “AI Factory” has become more than a catchy label – and why integration is now the product. McGinniss frames the partnership as a practical response to a hard reality: Enterprises want end-to-end, validated infrastructure that gets them to production faster, with security posture and observability designed in, not bolted on. Mao adds the field view from reference architectures – networking is the lifeblood, complexity is rising and most organizations can’t afford to treat AI infrastructure like a bespoke science project.

As AI shifts from IT efficiency to enterprise reinvention, the guests argue for a system mindset – “weakest link” thinking across compute, network, data and security – and for designs that let customers fail fast on use cases without failing on foundations. Vellante connects the dots to a new playbook. Get on the experience curve, build centers of excellence and treat GPU capacity like a shared service so utilization – and ROI – can compound. The takeaway is that production-grade AI will reward the organizations that simplify complexity early and invest with intent.