Pure Storage, the all-flash storage platform that helps innovators build a better world with data, announced its second AI-Ready Infrastructure offering, AIRI™ Mini, powered by NVIDIA. Architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI is purpose-built to enable data architects, scientists and business leaders to extend the power of the NVIDIAⓇ DGX-1™ system. With AIRI Mini, organisations of all sizes and budgets can implement a simple, powerful solution to build competitive advantage through AI at a price point that’s accessible for virtually any organisation in any industry.
AI represents an unprecedented opportunity for organisations to improve operations, deliver better customer experiences, and drive business performance through data-driven initiatives. According to a recent MIT Technology Review study, 82% of business and IT leaders believe AI is poised to have a positive impact on their industry. AIRI Mini offers a way for organisations to get started, and scales easily as their AI initiatives grow.
“The vast majority of business leaders understand the incredible opportunity presented by AI. Yet implementation complexities often hold their AI initiatives back from moving forward.” said Matt Burr, GM of FlashBlade, Pure Storage.
“While AIRI simplifies AI infrastructure for initiatives at any scale, AIRI Mini offers a powerful and affordable entry point for organisations to explore and scale as they grow into AI. AIRI Mini removes the final barriers for any organisation to leverage AI, and scales as AI workloads grow.”
Engineered as a fully-integrated software and hardware solution by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI Mini provides a simple, yet powerful, architecture that empowers organisations with the data-centric infrastructure needed to harness the true power of AI.
“Organisations require infrastructure purpose-built for AI, a system that’s easy to get started with and scales with their efforts,” said Jim McHugh, vice president and general manager, NVIDIA. “Both FlashBlade and DGX-1 are designed to scale seamlessly into the future, enabling customers to grow quickly and build upon their AI success.”
AIRI Mini is powered by one Pure Storage FlashBlade, the industry’s first storage platform architected for modern analytics and AI, configured with 7x 17TB blades, and two NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, delivering two petaFLOPS of deep learning performance. These systems are interconnected with 100GbE switches, supporting GPUDirect RDMA for maximum distributed training performance.
AIRI also leverages the NVIDIA GPU Cloud deep learning software stack for maximum GPU performance, and the Pure Storage AIRI Scaling Toolkit, optimised for multi-node training with DGX-1 and FlashBlade. With this integrated stack, data scientists can jumpstart their AI initiatives in hours, not weeks or months.
Pure also announced that both AIRI and AIRI Mini are now available with Nexus9000 100Gb Ethernet switches from Cisco. Cisco and Pure’s thousands of mutual customers can now take advantage of additional joint solutions as they embrace new initiatives around AI.
“There is a universally accepted demand for AI initiatives at scale, but the opportunities and requirements for AI stretch far beyond the Enterprise,” said Patrick Moorhead, founder, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
“Organisations of every size, at every stage in their life cycles, must leverage AI throughout the business to harness competitive advantage and differentiate from competition. AIRI Mini provides organisations without enterprise-level resources an on-ramp to AI that’s simple, performant and ready to deliver value within days.”
AIRI and AIRI Mini are the first converged infrastructure solutions purpose-built for AI, empowering data architects and scientists to deliver time-to-insight at scale. As organisations generate and store an increasingly vast amount of data, it is more important than ever that innovators drive value, insight and impact from their data to make their businesses smarter.
UnternehmerTUM, one of the largest innovation and entrepreneurship centres in Europe, supports founders and start-ups from their initial idea all the way to IPO. The German non-profit has joined forces with a number of leading organisations for the applied AI initiative, which is supported by Pure Storage FlashBlade and NVIDIA DGX-1.
“The appliedAI initiative is all about accelerating startups and the adoption of AI in industry as well as society. Our aim is to democratise AI by helping people understand the challenges and opportunities presented by this technology and to put it into practice,” said Andreas Liebl, managing director and head of appliedAI Initiative, UnternehmerTUM.
“A critical part of this is having the right technical infrastructure in place, which is why we have chosen Pure Storage and NVIDIA as technology partners. Pure Storage stands out in terms of technical excellence, especially when it comes to fast access to weighty data sets. By implementing Pure’s FlashBlade in combination with the NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning platform, we know we’ve selected one of the most innovative solutions on the market to enable our partner companies, individuals and Germany’s best AI startups to experiment with real-life AI and machine learning use cases.”
AIRI and AIRI Mini are available now through select reseller partners. Please visit our website for more information.
Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @IoTNow OR @jcIoTnow
