VDURA Named “AI Data Management Solution of the Year” in 2026 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Awards Program

Ninth Annual Program Honors the AI Innovators Shaping the Next Era of Global Innovation

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VDURA today announced that the V12 Data Platform has been selected as winner of the “AI Data Management Solution of the Year” award in the 9^th annual AI Breakthrough Awards program conducted by AI Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market today.

The VDURA Data Platform V12 offers data storage infrastructure software to manage data across every stage of the AI pipeline: ingest, model load, training, checkpointing, fine-tuning, inference, and archive. Built on the HYDRA architecture, V12 combines the speed of a true parallel file system with object storage.

NVMe flash handles performance-critical workloads while high-capacity HDDs serve cost-efficient data retention, all managed automatically through Dynamic Data Acceleration and the new Context-Aware Tiering engine. In addition, the Elastic Metadata Engine dynamically scales across nodes, delivering up to 20x improvement in metadata operations and handling billions of files and objects under active use. Native Snapshot Support creates instantaneous, space-efficient point-in-time copies for AI checkpoint protection, model versioning, and operational recovery. RDMA support enables GPU-direct data transfers that bypass the CPU entirely. SMR HDD Optimization unlocks 25-30% more usable capacity per rack without compromising throughput.

The platform supports multi-protocol access such as POSIX/DirectFlow, NFS, CSI, and more. V12's native CSI plug-in provides zero-script persistent-volume provisioning for containerized AI environments. VDURA delivers GPU-saturating throughput at 0.5-4 GB/s per GPU, scaling linearly across thousands of nodes.

“We’re proud to accept the ‘AI Data Management Solution of the Year’ award from AI Breakthrough. With V12, we’re increasing throughput performance, accelerating metadata operations, and reducing cost, while also simplifying data protection with new snapshot capabilities that make backup and recovery effortless at any scale,” said Ken Claffey, CEO of VDURA. “We will continue to introduce transformative data management capabilities that redefine data infrastructure. Through collaboration with partners and customers, we empower teams to tackle breakthrough AI research, scientific discovery, and large-scale analytics without compromise.”

For nearly a decade, the AI Breakthrough Awards have researched, analyzed and recognized the most important advances in artificial intelligence, and this year's field is the strongest yet. Thousands of nominations from over 20 countries poured in across categories including Agentic AI, Generative AI, Computer Vision, AIOps, Robotics, Natural Language Processing and industry-specific AI applications – underscoring the explosive global growth of AI and its importance as the defining technology of our time.

“VDURA Data Platform V12 represents the most comprehensive AI data management solution available today. With traditional AI data management, organizations are usually forced to stitch together separate file systems, object stores, and tiering software, each with its own management console, failure modes, and cost structure,” said Steve Johansson, managing director, AI Breakthrough. “VDURA eliminates this complexity with one namespace, one control plane, and one data plane. With distributed, elastic metadata scaling, automated snapshotting, and SMR HDD optimization enhancements, VDURA helps enterprises, AI service providers, and neoclouds meet the growing demands of AI in increasingly complex data environments.”

VDURA delivers 1,000+ production deployments across 50+ countries, and 25+ years of parallel file system heritage.

About VDURA

VDURA builds the world’s most powerful data platform for AI and high-performance computing, bringing hyperscale-class storage to the rest of the world, powered by HYDRA, the only high-performance distributed architecture purpose-built to unify memory, flash and disk in a single software-defined platform that keeps GPU clusters saturated while delivering hyperscale-class durability and economics. Visit vdura.com for more information.

About AI Breakthrough

Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the AI Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in Artificial Intelligence technologies, services, companies and products. The AI Breakthrough Awards provide public recognition for the achievements of AI companies and products in categories including Agentic AI, Machine Learning, Generative AI, Robotics, AI Hardware, Computer Vision and more. For more information visit AIBreakthroughAwards.com.

Tech Breakthrough LLC does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our recognition programs, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with award designations. Tech Breakthrough LLC recognition consists of the opinions of the Tech Breakthrough LLC organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Tech Breakthrough LLC disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this recognition program, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.