MinIO AIStor Blog: AI Storage & Infrastructure Insights

7 min read Original article ↗

Prompt Caching: Stop Paying GPUs to Read the Same Prompt Twice

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Every coding assistant, enterprise chatbot, and agent loop resends the same tool schemas, system instructions, and policy text on every turn, and the GPU rebuilds all of it into attention state before it can emit a single output token. Prompt caching computes that prefix once and reuses the KV state, and MemKV takes it from a per-process optimization to a shared NVMe-backed tier that survives routing across replicas, HBM eviction, worker restarts, and concurrency.

AgentMemory

AI/ML

AIStor

Performance

Operations

AgentMemory

AI Readiness

Performance

Operator's Guide

From Cache Hits to Production SLAs | Part 3 of 3

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Cache hits are not the outcome. Part 3 turns the architecture from Parts 1 and 2 into an evaluation framework: capture an honest tail-latency baseline first, treat MinIO's published 53-second-to-703-millisecond TTFT result as a proof point to reproduce rather than a business-case input, and follow the measurement chain from repeated context through prefix reuse and avoided recompute to unit economics, ending in a buyer checklist that judges a shared context tier on P99 TTFT and jitter rather than throughput or capacity.

AgentMemory

AI/ML

AIStor

Operations

Performance

AgentMemory

AI Readiness

Data Pipelines

Performance

When Repeated Context Becomes an Infrastructure Problem | Part 2 of 3

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A prefix cache that only helps one process is useful, but requests move across replicas, HBM fills, sessions spill, and workers restart, so reuse that lives inside a single worker is not a fleet architecture. Part 2 works through what the serving stack needs once KV state leaves local GPU memory: a tier that is larger than HBM, fast enough that restore beats recompute, shared across workers, and reachable through the runtime's own KV transfer path, which is memory behavior at cluster scope rather than storage.

AgentMemory

AI/ML

AIStor

Performance

AgentMemory

AI Readiness

Performance

Prompt Caching Is an AI Margin Lever, Not a Model Trick | Part 1 of 3

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Agentic AI applications resend the same project rules, tool schemas, and document context on every turn, so an expensive GPU fleet spends much of its time rebuilding a prefix it has already processed. Part 1 of three reframes prompt caching as an operating-margin lever rather than a model feature, maps prompt caching, prefix caching, KV cache, and KV cache offload to the business questions each one answers, and argues that reusable context needs a memory path rather than ordinary enterprise storage.

AgentMemory

AI/ML

AIStor

Performance

AgentMemory

AI Readiness

We deleted the agent mid-sentence. The work continued.

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Worker A gathers evidence, publishes an accepted handoff, starts another edit, and is deleted mid-sentence with the unfinished tail left visible. Worker B starts in a fresh runtime with no session state, verifies the last accepted boundary in the same authorized AIStor Memory Workspace, discards the unchecked tail, and continues the work rather than restarting it.

AgentMemory

AI/ML

AIStor

AgentMemory

AI Readiness

Data Pipelines

Your inbox agent has no business remembering your workouts

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Personal AI agents become useful as they learn you, but that familiarity should not require one agent accumulating your entire life. AIStor Memory gives each agent a bounded relationship with its own learned history, active workspace, and credential scope, all under your control.

AI/ML

AgentMemory

AIStor

AgentMemory

AI Readiness

MinIO text on dark background: The Complete GPU Storage Stack: AIStor + MemKV Architecture Guide.

The Complete GPU Storage Stack: AIStor + MemKV Architecture Guide

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Learn how AIStor, MemKV, and a secure data fabric form the three-layer GPU stack that slashes inference latency.

Architecture & Design Patterns

MemKV

Performance

Architect's Guide

Performance

AIStor

Embedded vs. External Iceberg Catalogs: How the Catalog Layer Works in a Data Lakehouse

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Most Iceberg lakehouses run the catalog as a separate external service, but AIStor embeds it directly inside the object store at /_iceberg.

Apache Ecosystem

Data Lakehouses

Storage & Infrastructure

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Introducing AIStor Memory: Long-Term Memory For AI Agents

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Every agent begins with the experience your organization has already earned.

AI/ML

AIStor

Integrations & Partners

AgentMemory

AI Agents

AIStor

AgentMemory

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Search Compressed Data Without Decompressing It

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Learn how MinLZ enables fast, selective searches of compressed data without decompression, dramatically reducing I/O and accelerating queries on object storage.

Performance

Performance

AIStor

Iceberg and MinIO AIStor logos separated by a symbol with arrows and a chain link on a gradient background.

Migrate Your Entire Iceberg Catalog to MinIO AIStor® In One Command Without Moving a Single File

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Moving your Iceberg catalog to MinIO AIStor no longer means re-registering tables by hand. The mc table migrate command reads metadata from your existing catalog, whether that's Nessie, Polaris, Hive Metastore, AWS Glue, or a SQL-backed catalog, and registers your tables directly in AIStor's built-in Iceberg REST catalog. Your Parquet files stay where they are.

AIStor

Data Lakes & Analytics

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The On-Premises Data Databricks Couldn't Reach. Until Now.

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MinIO joins the Databricks Software-Defined Storage Ecosystem. Live, zero-copy access to on-premises data.

Architecture & Design Patterns

AIStor

Data Lakes & Analytics

Databricks

Databricks

Open Table Formats

MinIO AIStor® Joins ClickHouse House Mates

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MinIO AIStor joins ClickHouse House Mates as a validated, trusted storage partner for ClickHouse Private deployments. AIStor gives ClickHouse the high-performance, fully S3-compatible object storage layer it needs to scale without limits.

AIStor

Data Lakes & Analytics

AIStor

ClickHouse

Logos of MinIO, Solidigm, and Intel on a dark background with pink and orange cloud-like shapes.

Density Was Supposed to Cost You Performance. The Numbers Say Otherwise.

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Solidigm and MinIO put high-density QLC NVMe object storage under real load and disproved the long-held assumption that density costs performance. The tested node is the same building block that scales directly into MinIO's ExaPOD reference architecture, so the path from a single pod to exascale runs on identical hardware and software.

AI/ML

Performance

Storage & Infrastructure

Architecture & Design Patterns

AI Readiness

MLOps

Generative AI

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GPU-Accelerated Semantic Search with NVIDIA cuVS and MinIO AIStor

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Not every semantic search problem needs a vector database. NVIDIA cuVS runs GPU vector search in memory; MinIO AIStor persists every artifact from raw documents to indexes. Full pipeline, working code.

AI/ML

Performance

AI Readiness

NVIDIA

S3

MinIO MemKV logo over a digital 3D graph with blue and teal lines and binary digits.

Introducing MinIO MemKV: Purpose built Context Store for Inference at scale

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MinIO MemKV eliminates the recompute tax in GPU inference clusters with shared petabyte-scale context memory.

AI/ML

Cloud Infrastructure

Performance

Storage & Infrastructure

MemKV

AI Readiness

Cloud Native

Data Pipelines

NVIDIA

MLOps

What Happens When Databricks Can Query Your On-Premises Data Directly

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Until recently, data that stayed on-premises was data that Databricks couldn't reach. If your analytics and AI workloads ran in Databricks, and your most valuable data lived on-prem, you had two options: build and maintain a replication pipeline to copy data into the cloud, or accept that certain datasets simply wouldn't participate in your cloud analytics.Both options carry real costs. But a third option now exists: Databricks querying on-premises data directly, with no copies and no pipelines, through the open Delta Sharing protocol embedded natively in MinIO AIStor.

AIStor

AI/ML

Data Lakes & Analytics

Databricks

Databricks

Data Lakehouses

Apache Iceberg

AIStor Table Sharing: The Storage Layer Databricks Has Been Waiting For

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Databricks needs your on-prem data. AIStor Table Sharing delivers it live — no replication, no pipelines.

AIStor

Data Lakes & Analytics

Integrations & Partners

Databricks

Databricks

Why Modern AI Architecture Breaks at the Data Layer

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Modern AI architecture rests on a comfortable assumption: when AI slows down, the fix is more compute or a better model. Bigger GPUs. Denser clusters. New architectures. That assumption is now costing organizations real money.

AI/ML

Storage & Infrastructure

AIStor

Cloud Infrastructure

AI Readiness

Cloud Computing

Generative AI

Data Engineering

Transparent digital cloud and servers interconnected with a central server hub emitting light.

The Ultimate Guide to Overcoming the AI Storage Bottleneck in 2026

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Storage, not models or compute, is now AI's biggest bottleneck. The fix is an architectural one, not a bigger GPU.

Storage & Infrastructure

AIStor

Architecture & Design Patterns

Cloud Infrastructure

Data Lakes & Analytics

AI Readiness

Cloud Operating Model

Data modernization

Cloud Computing

Data Engineering

Building a RAG Lab with AIStor and Milvus

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Learn how to build a vector database lab with Milvus and AIStor

AI/ML

AI Readiness

Benchmarking Vector Index Creation with MinIO AIStor, Milvus, and NVIDIA cuVS

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106 million vectors indexed 12x faster. AIStor with NVIDIA cuVS and GPUDirect RDMA rewrites the benchmark.

AI/ML

AIStor

Performance

Integrations & Partners

Storage & Infrastructure

AI Readiness

Data Pipelines

LLM

NVIDIA

Software Defined Storage

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AIStor Inside NVIDIA BlueField-4: Object Data at Wire Speed

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Legacy storage talks to the AI factory. AIStor lives inside it — running natively on NVIDIA BlueField-4 Vera

AIStor

AI/ML

Performance

Storage & Infrastructure

Architecture & Design Patterns

AI Readiness

Data Pipelines

Data modernization

NVIDIA

LLM

Databricks logo with stacked blocks icon on a blurred gradient background in dark pink and orange tones.

Unlocking On-Premises Data for Databricks: Secure, Zero-Copy Sharing with AIStor Table Sharing

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Delta Sharing + AIStor enables zero-copy access to on-prem data from Databricks without duplication

AIStor

Architecture & Design Patterns

Data Lakes & Analytics

Integrations & Partners

Security

Databricks