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Successful AI Operations Depend on High-Performance Storage

Julie Fagan

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around since the 14th century. However, it wasn’t until 1898 that the concept started to become a reality, when Tesla debuted the first radio-controlled driverless boat, followed by the first driverless car in 1925. The first robot made its debut on the big screen with the 1927 release of Metropolis.

Those first uses of AI were probably seen as novel ideas that were met with a combination of awe and fear. Few, if any, people back then could have predicted that in just 100 years, AI would become a very real, crucial aspect of our daily lives. The camera on your smartphone that knows how to automatically focus on the main subject. Instant identification of suspicious use of your credit card. Early detection of colon cancer. All these advancements—and many more—can be credited to AI.

To be competitive in today’s market, organizations across all industries are increasingly investing in AI solutions. Regardless of its use, the heart of every AI operation is a high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. Turning AI into real results requires three key components:

  1. Data—lots and lots of data; the more data, the better the results
  2. Extreme compute speed to quickly process and analyze petabytes of data
  3. A storage solution that can keep pace with the compute power
With NetApp® high-performance E-Series systems, you get a cost-effective storage solution that enables fast, continuous feeding of data to an AI application. You can scale E-Series systems seamlessly to accommodate data that’s coming in from the Internet of Things as well as data that’s generated from machine learning and deep learning training.

With a NetApp E-Series HPC solution, you can support multipetabyte datasets and file systems such as Lustre, IBM Spectrum Scale, and BeeGFS. Enterprise-grade E-Series systems deliver top performance in industry benchmarks. A granular, building-block approach to growth enables you to scale seamlessly from terabytes to petabytes by adding capacity in any increment, one or multiple drives at a time. With industry-leading density per megabyte, a NetApp E-Series HPC solution helps reduce your power, cooling, and support costs to significantly lower your TCO.

A NetApp E-Series HPC solution enables you to:
  • Accelerate performance. Deploy systems that deliver top performance in industry benchmarks. With NetApp HPC, your system can process up to 1 million random read IOPS at less than 250 microseconds and 14GBps sustained (maximum burst) write bandwidth per scalable building block.
  • Improve reliability. Keep AI operations running and maintain data integrity with systems that deliver 99.9999%+ availability and industry-leading durability, based on nearly 1 million units shipped.
  • Simplify operations. Nondisruptively add performance and capacity without complex deployments or migrations, instantly configure new systems for faster deployment, and automate common tasks for easier management.
Start meeting the data speed and storage demands of AI workloads. Learn more about how to improve your data storage performance and reliability with NetApp E-Series HPC solutions for AI.

Julie Fagan

Julie Fagan has a long career in high-tech solutions marketing. She loves working at NetApp where she gets to focus on bringing the best video surveillance and high performance computing storage solutions to the world along with her awesome co-workers.

View all Posts by Julie Fagan

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