SC23: Pure Storage Strengthened Portfolio for AI Use Cases

Pure Storage, Inc. strengthened its portfolio for AI use cases and continued customer momentum across global AI deployments.

Among the 1st enterprise data storage vendors to receive the Nvidia DGX BasePOD certification, and delivering with Cisco Systems, Inc., Cisco Validated Designs for FlashStack for AI, the company continues to provide enterprises with efficient, reliable access to data in support of new AI applications, underpinning modern, scalable business outcomes.

Momentum highlights:
With the most comprehensive data storage platform in the market, it delivers efficiency and performance at every step of the AI process – from data curation to model training to inference – regardless of where enterprises sit in their AI adoption. Powering advanced AI projects globally, the firm empowers customers to launch AI initiatives at any scale, providing a flexible data storage foundation that grows as needs evolve. Critical advancements to the firm’s portfolio include:

• AIRI: The firm has been at the forefront of optimized AI storage since the launch of FlashBlade in 2017 and AIRI, its AI-Ready Infrastructure reference architecture co-developed with Nvidia Corp., in 2018. Today, it is among the 1st enterprise data storage vendors to become Nvidia DGX BasePOD certified. Built on the Nvidia DGX BasePOD reference architecture for AI and leveraging the latest FlashBlade//S storage platform, AIRI accelerates and simplifies AI scaling and deployment to keep enterprise focus on delivering valuable insights, rather than managing IT.

FlashStack for AI

• FlashStack for AI: With FlashStack for AI and supporting validated designs, the company and Cisco help IT teams navigate new AI application stacks and data pipelines while avoiding infrastructure and operation silos. Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) with AI-accelerated FlashStack and Nvidia AI Enterprise software for virtualized and containerized environments serve as automation playbooks for enterprises to deploy common AI models for generative AI, LLMs, computer vision, and more. With the latest tested and proven CVDs, Pure, Cisco, and Nvidia technologies help IT teams deliver AI infrastructure efficiently and securely, at scale, while enabling data science teams to get projects into production faster with less risk.

• Portworx for AI: AI workloads are often deployed in containerized environments to ensure that data scientists can achieve agility with model training and predictions, meanwhile, platform engineering teams have to address the associated complexity with delivering self-service, data resiliency, and efficient use of storage in multi-cloud environments. With Portworx by Pure Storage, enterprises can accelerate data science productivity using rapid spin-up of notebooks and pipelines and eliminate data transfers between different types of storage or multi-cloud regions. Additionally, Portworx can be leveraged to protect datasets on notebooks across several stages of the pipeline and deliver cost savings with improved utilization of underlying storage anywhere.

“Pure Storage anticipated the rapid rise of AI at its inception, delivering the high-performance, efficient, and container-ready storage platform the industry needed to capitalize on and truly derive value from the massive amounts of data used to fuel this technology. Today’s momentum not only underscores Pure Storage’s continued leadership across enterprise AI deployments, but its commitment to provide enterprises everywhere with a robust data storage infrastructure designed to meet the demands of the most data-intensive AI workloads. We’re excited to continue empowering organizations to navigate the complexities of AI with confidence,” said Ajay Singh, CPO, Pure.

“Businesses across industries are leveraging generative AI to enrich customer experiences and transform operational efficiency. With Nvidia DGX BasePOD certification, Pure Storage can help customers simplify and scale their initiatives, speeding their return on investment with AI-powered insights,” said Tony Paikeday, senior director, DGX platform, Nvidia.

“AI is changing applications and infrastructure. With FlashStack for AI workloads, supported by the newly announced Cisco Validated Designs, IT organizations can deploy a validated architecture for AI workloads that reduces the design and investment risks when building a data, compute, and storage infrastructure for the AI data pipeline so data scientists stay focused on delivering AI solutions for better business outcomes.,” said Jeremy Foster, Sr. VP and GM, Cisco Compute.

Customers trust Pure Storage for advanced ai deployments:
The company supports over 100 customers across a variety of AI use cases, including self-driving cars, financial services, genomics, gaming, manufacturing.

“Aera is an AI-based Decision Intelligence and Automation platform for enterprises across the globe. It’s a purposefully designed platform for digitizing, augmenting, and automating enterprise decision-making using fully automated AI engines. We are partnering with Portworx by Pure Storage because ofWith the most comprehensive data storage platform in the market, its multi-cloud architecture, efficient resource consumption, and scalability to serve our global customers. Portworx delivered the very best TCO and customer experience as the underlying storage solution for Aera.“, said Shariq Mansoor, founder and CTO, Aera Technologies.

“The ability to effectively manage, move, and filter data is critical to the success of our AI Center, which leverages AI and ML to improve the overall gaming experience – from graphics and artmaking to game planning, programming and more. The simplicity and high performance of Pure Storage’s FlashBlade enables us to significantly reduce the time and value associated with data management for our AI workloads, while gaining the flexibility to scale our on-premise AI infrastructure at no additional cost. In some cases, we’ve been able to reduce the time it takes to move and load data of each user, stage, and device, from several days to a single day. We’re excited to continue pursuing diverse AI innovations using Pure Storage to strengthen our leadership in the industry,” said Jin-hyuk Jang, director, IT Infrastructure, NCSoft.

“Pure Storage has enabled us to improve and advance patient care by harnessing more advanced data, as well as capabilities like AI, within some of our clinical applications. Using Pure Storage, we now have an environment that is capable of serving up the performance that is required for AI, machine learning, and digital processing. To further drive AI and machine learning use cases across St. Joseph’s, we’re continuing to add more radiology systems in our environment, and are looking to expand to other imaging products in the future. With Pure Storage, we’re now in the position to say ‘yes, we can support that’ to just about any data-oriented use case our organization requires,” said Jesse Fasolo, head,technology infrastructure and cybersecurity, information security officer, St. Joseph’s Health.

“At DKFZ, we are dedicated to researching cancer development and the factors that influence the risk of cancer. Digital data, supported by advanced AI and ML models, is at the epicenter of this work. Pure Storage FlashBlade provides us with the reliable infrastructure we need to efficiently and effectively derive value from massive amounts of data, while ensuring that our 1,458 researchers gain rapid and secure access to this data. FlashBlade’s simplicity, coupled with its energy efficiency and performance, not only reduces the manual workload on our IT team, but speeds time to insights for our researchers. We’re excited to continue working with Pure to advance cancer research quicker than ever before,” said Tobias Reber, team lead, central servers, DKFZ.

Industry significance:
The company long anticipated the rising demand for AI, delivering an efficient, high performance, container-ready storage platform to fuel the most advanced enterprise AI initiatives. From supporting enterprise development of large-scale AI training environments, to the deployment of large language models for AI inference, the firm provides customers with the flexibility to embark on their AI journey at any scale.

Growing excitement around AI, however, has prompted global enterprises to rapidly integrate the technology across their businesses to drive real-time decision making, operational efficiency, and enhanced scalability. Yet many struggle to truly operationalize AI without the right data storage infrastructure in place to make data readily available based on need, policy, and security, while managing costs.

The company offers the performance storage platform required for AI that is automated, future-proof, and adaptable to evolving needs, catering to a broad spectrum of high-performance AI requirements.

Resources:
AI : Drive Efficiency Every Step of the AI Process    
AIRI AI Ready Infrastructure Optimized for Enterprise Scale    
Blog : FlashStack for AI    
Report : Drivers of Change: Meeting the Energy and Data Challenges of AI Adoption