NetApp Ontap AI Integrated Solution Gives Enterprises Fast Way to Support AI Workloads in Data Center

By Tony Paikeday, director, product marketing, DGX portfolio, AI supercomputers and accelerated data science platform, Nvidia Corp.

Many business leaders know their company’s future is intertwined with the successful adoption of AI, but struggle with how to operationalize the technology at scale. Transitioning from experimentation into business-impacting models deployed in production can be a real challenge.

NetApp, Inc. and Nvidia, Corp. are making it simple for enterprises to deploy AI fast, with ONTAP AI integrated solutions that come in pre-configured sizes and are pre-tested and optimized for the scale of AI resources a business might need. It’s the simplified model of converged infrastructure now applied to AI.

More so than talent or even budget, the top inhibitor to deploying AI scale is often concerns around platforms.

For those in this infrastructure dilemma, common challenges include:

• Complexity of designing AI infrastructure, including optimizing the balance of compute, storage and networking in support of the unique demands of data analytics, model training and production model-serving.

• Deploying a platform involves a multilayered stack of hardware and software (much of it open source), followed by an amount of troubleshooting as data science teams find themselves taking on the role of SIs.

• Upskilling IT teams to understand the tools required to operationalize and manage HPC, scheduling jobs and pinpointing where in the technology stack lies a performance-impacting problem that might straddle multiple vendors.

Approach to infrastructure, applied to AI
The world of AI and ML is not the first domain to need a better approach to systemizing IT infrastructure to implementation. Just over a decade ago, IT witnessed the rise of integrated infrastructure solutions that offered enterprises an easier alternative to the highly engineered, bespoke systems approach that was so common then.

NetApp has been at the forefront of converged infrastructure solutions, offering simpler deployments with pre-integrated, modularized versions of reference architectures, packaged in orderable units. These were pre-assembled and tested in a system house before shipping to customers.

Onsite installation was faster with a single expert team putting it all together, inclusive of compute, storage and networking. And the post-deployment experience was easier with a single point of contact for all support, and coordinated engagement across all participating vendors.

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Introducing ONTAP AI integrated solution
ONTAP AI has proven itself as a platform on which enterprises can scale AI. The 2 companies are now making it easier for organizations to adopt this reference architecture that uses Nvidia DGX A100 systems.

With this ONTAP AI integrated solution, the 2 firms are bundling DGX A100 with NetApp All Flash Storage and Nvidia networking in 3 prescriptive configurations that follow the original ONTAP AI reference architecture.

Companies’s partner Arrow Electronics provides the business, technical and operational services needed to deploy the solution, including:

• Single SKU per configuration

• Assembly and testing at Arrow’s integration center

• Pre-installation site survey to capture environment details

• Shipment to customer location, with onsite installation by Arrow’s Professional Services engineers

With ONTAP AI integrated solution, businesses benefit from a streamlined ordering and deployment process, and also a simplified, unified support model. Nvidia provides support that’s coordinated with NetApp to ensure the fastest path to resolution of any issues.

ONTAP AI – Delivered 2 ways
Organizations that need AI infrastructure have 2 ways to acquire ONTAP AI. They can use the turnkey, integrated solution for fast deployment and simplified support. Or, they can follow the reference architecture on which the integrated offering is based, working with their choice of approved ONTAP AI partner to put it together, customized the way they prefer.

ONTAP AI integrated solution is available in North America.

Resources:
Blog: Deploy and operationalize AI quickly and easily with the NetApp ONTAP AI integrated solution
Reference architecture
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