Dec 23, 2025 (TheStoragereport) –AI workloads are exposing a hard truth about enterprise infrastructure: systems built purely for speed tend to fail once scale and failure become constants. Ken Claffey, CEO and President of VDURA, has spent decades inside high-performance storage, watching parallel file systems succeed, or break, under real operational pressure.
VDURA’s foundation in PanFS traces back to one of the few parallel file systems proven in production HPC environments, where availability and data integrity mattered as much as throughput. Claffey explains why that history is increasingly relevant as AI moves from experimental clusters into mission-critical settings. GPU starvation, failed checkpoints, and complex storage tiers quickly turn into cost and productivity problems when durability is treated as secondary. Retrofitting resilience into systems designed only for speed rarely works at scale.
The conversation also explores VDURA’s shift from appliance-based delivery to a software-defined model, and why modern AI pipelines demand architectures that remain predictable when components inevitably fail. As AI infrastructure grows larger, the real challenge becomes sustaining performance under failure. This episode examines why storage architecture shapes whether AI systems stay productive at scale.