INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres
Pure Storage announces AIRI Mini
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P
ure Storage, the all-flash storage
platform that helps innovators build a
better world with data, has announced
its second AI-Ready Infrastructure offering,
AIRI Mini, powered by NVIDIA.
Architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA,
AIRI is purpose-built to enable data architects,
scientists and business leaders to extend
the power of the NVIDIA DGX-1 system.
With AIRI Mini, organisations of all sizes and
budgets can implement a simple, powerful
solution to build competitive advantage
through AI at a price point that’s accessible
for virtually any organisation in any industry.
AI represents an unprecedented opportunity
for organisations to improve operations,
deliver better customer experiences and
drive business performance through data-
driven initiatives. According to a recent MIT
Technology Review study, 82% of business
and IT leaders believe AI is poised to have a
positive impact on their industry. AIRI Mini
offers a way for organisations to get started
and scales easily as their AI initiatives grow.
“The majority of business leaders understand
the incredible opportunity presented by
AI,” said Matt Burr, GM of FlashBlade, Pure
Storage. “Yet implementation complexities
Pure Storage has
announced its
second AI-Ready
Infrastructure
offering, AIRI Mini,
powered by NVIDIA
www.intelligentcio.com
often hold their AI initiatives back from
moving forward. While AIRI simplifies AI
infrastructure for initiatives at any scale, AIRI
Mini offers a powerful and affordable entry
point for organisations to explore and scale
as they grow into AI. AIRI Mini removes the
final barriers for any organisation to leverage
AI and scales as AI workloads grow.”
Engineered as a fully-integrated software
and hardware solution by Pure Storage
and NVIDIA, AIRI Mini provides a simple,
yet powerful, architecture that empowers
organisations with the data-centric
infrastructure needed to harness the true
power of AI.
“Organisations require infrastructure
purpose-built for AI, a system that’s easy to
get started with and scales with their efforts,”
added Jim McHugh, Vice President and
General Manager, NVIDIA. “Both FlashBlade
and DGX-1 are designed to scale seamlessly
into the future, enabling customers to grow
quickly and build upon their AI success.”
AIRI Mini is powered by one Pure Storage
FlashBlade, the industry’s first storage
platform architected for modern analytics
and AI, configured with 7x 17TB blades and
two NVIDIA DGX-1 servers, delivering two
petaFLOPS of deep learning performance.
These systems are interconnected with
100GbE switches, supporting GPUDirect
RDMA for maximum distributed training
performance. AIRI also leverages the
NVIDIA GPU Cloud deep learning software
stack for maximum GPU performance
and the Pure Storage AIRI Scaling Toolkit,
optimised for multi-node training with
DGX-1 and FlashBlade. With this integrated
stack, data scientists can jumpstart their AI
initiatives in hours, not weeks or months.
Pure has also announced that both AIRI and
AIRI Mini are now available with Nexus9000
100Gb Ethernet switches from Cisco. Cisco
and Pure’s thousands of mutual customers
can now take advantage of additional joint
solutions as they embrace new initiatives
around AI.
“There is a universally accepted demand for
AI initiatives at scale, but the opportunities
and requirements for AI stretch far beyond
the enterprise,” said Patrick Moorhead,
Founder, President and Principal Analyst at
Moor Insights & Strategy. “Organisations of
every size, at every stage in their life cycles,
must leverage AI throughout the business
to harness competitive advantage and
differentiate from competition. AIRI Mini
provides organisations without enterprise-
level resources, an on-ramp to AI that’s
simple, performant and ready to deliver value
within days.”
AIRI and AIRI Mini are the first converged
infrastructure solutions purpose-built
for AI, empowering data architects and
scientists to deliver time-to-insight at scale.
As organisations generate and store an
increasingly vast amount of data, it is more
important than ever that innovators drive
value, insight and impact from their data to
make their businesses smarter. n
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