Elastic and Dell AI Data Platform: The foundation for high-velocity enterprise search

Supercharge your AI workloads with a turnkey, GPU-accelerated stack that transforms unstructured data into production-ready context instantly.

Brian Bergholm

March 16, 2026

Summary

Elastic and Dell Technologies have collaborated to develop the Dell Data Search Engine.
The Dell Data Search Engine is a vector database powered by Elasticsearch and accelerated by NVIDIA cuVS, natively integrated within the Dell AI Data Platform.
This embedded solution delivers up to 12x faster vector indexing performance for AI workloads.

Headlines everywhere confirm what we all know: Organizations are investing heavily in AI. To achieve true business value from these investments, you need a next-generation infrastructure that can store massive amounts of data, search it, retrieve relevant context, and scale. Furthermore, you need agentic AI systems that can do more than just provide search results. You need systems that reason, learn, iterate, answer questions, and take action.

Keep reading to see how Elastic and Dell Technologies have collaborated to develop the Dell Data Search Engine, a vector database powered by Elastic and accelerated by NVIDIA cuVS, natively integrated within the Dell AI Data Platform. This embedded solution delivers up to 12x faster vector indexing performance for AI workloads.

Building cost-effective enterprise AI

Organizations are diving into real-time retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and exploring all that agentic AI has to offer like chatbots that answer questions based on live news or constantly changing conditions, research assistants that monitor fast-moving IT logs or business metrics, or tools that glean recently updated internal documentation like a learning engine founded on a growing corpus of enterprise data and knowledge.

Amid these opportunities, you may be wondering how to build similar solutions in a swift and economical manner. How can you deliver at the pace of what your organization needs without breaking the bank?

Simplifying deployment and scaling

For organizations looking to accelerate their enterprise AI deployments, the Dell AI Data Platform eliminates the complexity of building enterprise AI solutions by combining hardware and software into a single validated platform. It delivers a tightly integrated AI stack that streamlines the ability to build, deploy, and scale enterprise AI.

The platform helps you build AI workflows, boost creativity, and scale enterprise innovation seamlessly. And it allows you to integrate proprietary enterprise data into AI workflows and accelerate data processing, communication, and storage for applications. The result? You can deploy and scale enterprise-grade AI solutions faster with lower overhead costs.

Unlocking real-time insights from unstructured data

Moving AI from experimentation to production shouldn’t feel overwhelming. The Dell AI Data Platform is designed to help you do exactly that by automating data preparation and simplifying how AI systems access enterprise data, reducing friction for a better and faster experience.

At the heart of the platform are purpose-built storage and data engines that seamlessly connect AI agents to high‑quality, trusted data. Combined with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, Dell delivers a validated, GPU‑accelerated solution that brings together storage, data engines, and NVIDIA AI infrastructure, networking, and AI software.

Expanding capabilities with Dell Data Search Engine

To further expand the platform’s capabilities, in 2025, Dell announced a strategic collaboration with Elastic to bring secure, real-time access to massive volumes of unstructured data for inferencing, analytics, and intelligent search.

The Dell Data Search Engine, powered by Elasticsearch, is a fast, scalable vector database for structured, unstructured, and vector data. Elasticsearch enables advanced vector search, semantic retrieval, and hybrid keyword search — all essential capabilities for modern AI applications. It helps turn petabytes of unstructured data into real-time, actionable context for workloads.

Hybrid search — combining vector (semantic) and keyword (lexical) retrieval — is the gold standard for enterprise AI retrieval. It is essential for systems where both meaning-based relevance and exact-match precision matter simultaneously. This drives accuracy in RAG, copilot, and enterprise search use cases.

Pure vector databases only address semantic similarity. Elasticsearch unifies vector similarity, keyword precision, metadata filtering, and hybrid ranking into one engine and one index — a technically superior architecture that took years of industry-wide development to mature.

Through Elastic, the new Dell Data Search Engine makes it easier to explore and interact with data using natural language. Through the complete set of capabilities in Elastic's Enterprise tier, this engine makes it easier to explore and interact with data using natural language and power use cases like RAG, semantic search, and agentic AI pipelines. It is also integrated with Dell MetadataIQ, an automated metadata extraction capability to search billions of files stored on PowerScale and ObjectScale using rich, granular metadata. With GPU-accelerated vector indexing and NVIDIA cuVS integration, it allows you to leverage NVIDIA GPUs to ingest tens of billions of vectors in hours instead of days and deliver a 12x higher throughput while maintaining accuracy and search speed. This increase in speed is vital to move from batch pipelines to real-time pipelines that feed agents with the latest data and enable them to make more accurate decisions.

Storage engines built for AI at scale

Powering all of this is Dell’s storage engines — Dell PowerScale, Dell ObjectScale, and Dell Lightning File System — which deliver the performance, security, and multi-protocol access that modern AI workloads demand.

Dell PowerScale drives leading performance per rack unit with NVIDIA certified file storage featuring GPUDirect and validated for the NVIDIA Cloud Partner Program.
Dell ObjectScale is the industry’s highest-performing object storage platform, delivering massively scalable, S3‑native storage for demanding AI workloads.
Dell Lightning File System is the world’s fastest parallel file system, delivering extreme performance density for AI training and inferencing.

What’s next?

The Dell AI Data Platform is a turnkey GPU-accelerated stack for enterprise-grade AI. Together, Elastic and Dell are enabling the Elastic AI Ecosystem with the speed, accuracy, and context required by modern AI solutions to help organizations turn unstructured data into an AI advantage. This capability is available now, with general availability of GPU acceleration targeted for Q2 2026.

Catch up on the prior announcements for more information on this joint collaboration.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

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