Data Fuels AI. We Fuel Data. ONTAP AI Validated with NVIDIA DGX-2 Servers
Mike McNamara
Businesses across nearly every industry are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to stay competitive, drive growth, and decrease expenses. From self-driving vehicles to genomic medicine, chatbots, and predictive maintenance, the success of AI depends completely on access to large amounts of data that can be used to identify patterns, develop predictive insights, and enable increasingly accurate autonomous systems.
Almost 12 months ago, NetApp and NVIDIA partnered to create NetApp® ONTAP® AI to offer customers a turnkey solution for supporting AI, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) workloads with enterprise-class performance, reliability, and support. NetApp ONTAP AI integrates DGX servers, NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, and NetApp cloud-connected all-flash storage systems with state-of-the-art networking.
ONTAP AI unifies data management across the data pipeline with a single platform that enables users to securely control and protect their critical data across edge, core, and cloud. The solution is fully integrated and is purpose-built for the performance and scalability that AI environments demand. It supports seamless, cost-effective movement of data across premises and clouds. ONTAP data management software delivers an unparalleled 22:1 overall data-reduction ratio and up to 54% lower total cost of ownership compared to direct-attached storage. And it can handle more than 400 billion files with a single namespace.
Figure 1) NetApp ONTAP AI verified architecture with DGX-2 servers.[/caption]
NVIDIA DGX-2 GPU servers are enabling the next generation of ML and AI applications. NetApp has published a reference architecture for using NetApp AFF storage systems with NVIDIA DGX-2 servers. The design and validation of the architecture is consistent with the NetApp Verified Architecture (NVA) for NVIDIA DGX-1 servers found in NVA-1121. For details of the validation as well as benchmark testing results that demonstrate the performance capabilities of the solution, read this report.
Mike McNamara
Mike McNamara is a senior leader of product and solution marketing at NetApp with 25 years of data management and data storage marketing experience. Before joining NetApp over 10 years ago, Mike worked at Adaptec, EMC and HP. Mike was a key team leader driving the launch of the industry’s first cloud-connected AI/ML solution (NetApp), unified scale-out and hybrid cloud storage system and software (NetApp), iSCSI and SAS storage system and software (Adaptec), and Fibre Channel storage system (EMC CLARiiON). In addition to his past role as marketing chairperson for the Fibre Channel Industry Association, he is a member of the Ethernet Technology Summit Conference Advisory Board, a member of the Ethernet Alliance, a regular contributor to industry journals, and a frequent speaker at events. Mike also published a book through FriesenPress titled "Scale-Out Storage - The Next Frontier in Enterprise Data Management", and was listed as a top 50 B2B product marketer to watch by Kapos.
