Chungbuk Technopark in South Korea Chooses Pure Storage FlashBlade

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Chungbuk Technopark, a regional innovation hub in Chungcheongbuk-do province, South Korea, has leveraged FlashBlade, its unified fast file and object storage platform, to enhance the AI development environment it provides to local businesses by boosting storage data processing performance and improving GPU usage.

Customer challenge:
Chungbuk Technopark is an innovation hub that supports growth and economic development, including a development environment for deep learning and ML that helps local companies develop AI products. To support AI initiatives, it needed storage with AI-optimized performance, simple management, and that was upgradeable.

Customer impact:
It built its AI environment around the NVIDIA DGX A100 system. After comparing flash storage solutions, it selected Pure Storage FlashBlade for a an integration with its DGX systems, maximizing the efficiency and management of data used to develop and train AI technologies.

Benefits include:

• Advanced AI development infrastructure: Chungbuk Technopark increased data processing performance twofold, improved the GPU server’s data read speed, and expanded GPU usage from 30% to 80% – an increase of about 2.6x. It also enhanced performance, scalability, and data availability for the AI development environment, while also achieving a tenfold increase in reliability.
• Zero downtime to meet a growing workload: FlashBlade allows the end user to increase performance and capacity without any downtime or data migrations. This means more reliable service for companies that rely on the AI platform.
• Simple, efficient storage management: With Pure’s AI-powered full-stack storage management and monitoring software, Pure1, Chungbuk Technopark’s staff spends much less time and cost managing storage capacity and performance.

Pure supports its customer’s efforts to help local companies innovate AI-enabled services and products. A promising beauty-tech start-up, for example, uses the AI platform to analyze skin and scalp conditions and market customized beauty products. A fast-growing local start-up successfully developed AI technology to analyze the movement of wild boars. This helps livestock farmers prevent African Swine Fever (ASF), a development that earned the company the H1 2022 Best Patent Award of Korea by The Hankook Ilbo.

“With the introduction of FlashBlade, we have trained our AI models faster with 2x faster data read speeds. FlashBlade has paved the way for us to build a better AI development environment, enabling many companies in the region to achieve significant business results,” said Cheol-hong Kim, digital strategy, team leader, Chungbuk Technopark.

“The advancement of the AI development environment of Chungbuk Technopark has helped many local businesses maximize the potential of AI and data and accelerate innovation. We will continue to collaborate with companies and institutions in Korea by providing modern all-flash storage infrastructure to efficiently meet the exploding data demands of the AI era,” said Jaesung Yoo, MD, Pure Storage Korea.

Case study: Chungbuk Technopark Drives Business Innovation with AI