Vast Data has broadened its reach into life sciences with new Canadian customers for its AI storage services.

Both SciNet at the University of Toronto, and SHARCNET at the University of Waterloo have chosen Vast as their data and AI operating system.

The deals build on previous Canadian wins for the New York-headquartered firm, with both Hyertec Cloud and Buzz High Performance Computing selecting Vast this year for their AI sovereignty strategies.

With both academic institutions involved in life sciences, the deals also build on Vast’s existing customers in the sector, including Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network, Joint Genome Institute, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In a recent interview with SDxCentral, CEO Renen Hallak singled out life science customers as the most rewarding of Vast’s client base.

“I feel like that's our way of giving back. I tell them often that we give them better discounts than we do the rest of the customer base, because we feel like they're advancing humanity. They're discovering new drugs."

SciNet and SHARCNET will be using Vast’s services to unify AI and high-performance computing (HPC) on a single platform, while leveraging Vast’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) for consistent performance across small-file, high-IOPS and metadata-heavy workloads keeping CPU and GPU resources compute-bound in their workloads.

The Vast DataSpace meanwhile be utilized for ensuring a namespace with multi-tenancy and data services to secure sensitive data and multi-organization research collaborations in a compliant fashion.

Vast framed the deal as developing a common data foundation spanning national research sites, Canadian infrastructure providers, and public cloud environments, “enabling replication, shared datasets and consistent governance.”

“Canada has made bold, strategic investments in AI – from national research centers to cloud infrastructure designed for large-scale GPU computing,” said Pezhman Sharifi, director at VAST Data Canada Inc.

“What unites SciNet, SHARCNET and other Canadian infrastructure partners is a shared need for an operating system that keeps GPUs and researchers fed with data without adding operational complexity. The Vast AI OS delivers a single, global platform for Canada’s innovation economy – from academic labs to production AI services.”

The deals follow headline wins in the last quarter for Vast, including tie-ups with hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Google Cloud, and neoclouds, including Coreweave.

Cisco has also tapped its resources this year, with its AI points of delivery (PODs) integrated with Vast InsightEngine, the AI platform and backbone for Vast Data AI OS.

The update to Cisco’s Nvidia-based AI infrastructure aimed for users to leverage the Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design to grab raw data and accelerate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.