Pure Storage redefines AI-ready infrastructure

Pure Storage®, the IT pioneer that provides the most advanced data storage technology and services in the world, has announced AIRI®/S, the next generation of its complete AI-ready infrastructure developed by Pure Storage and NVIDIA. AIRI/S gives businesses a simple, on-demand infrastructure that accelerates AI initiatives of any size.

Enterprises in a variety of industries have recognized the power of AI to accelerate innovation and gain a competitive advantage through critical business insights. The complexity and rigidity of legacy infrastructure technology – both on-premises and in the cloud – is, however, a barrier for enterprises seeking to realize the promise of AI-based data science.

To address this need, Pure Storage and NVIDIA launched AIRI in 2018, the first AI-ready infrastructure reference architecture designed to help organizations improve utilization and uptime, and ultimately scale their AI and data science investments without complexity.

“Traditional approaches to AI infrastructure often result in silos of servers and storage that are either over-spent on capacity or starve AI workloads. With a focus on simplicity and scalability, AIRI//S enables global enterprises to achieve better time to insights and make the most out of their data with AI. We’re incredibly excited to expand on our collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver the next-generation of AI-ready infrastructure.” – Amy Fowler, Vice President, Strategy and Solutions, FlashBlade, Pure Storage

Pure announced the release of AIRI/S, powered by FlashBlade®/S, NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, and end-to-end networking based on NVIDIA Quantum and Spectrum networking platforms, as the next step in its collaboration with NVIDIA.

AIRI/S offers enterprises a tried-and-true, easy-to-use, and scalable infrastructure for all stages of the AI data pipeline. AIRI/S, the first solution to include Pure’s revolutionary new FlashBlade/S, delivers significant advancements in non-disruptive performance, density, power efficiency, and scale, resulting in optimal alignment to the industry-leading AI training performance and parallelism gains delivered by DGX systems.

“Enterprises are turning to AI to grow top-line results while enhancing customer experiences and reducing costs. These complex challenges require integrated, full-stack computing optimized for AI, and AIRI//S built on NVIDIA DGX systems provides customers with modular, high-performance enterprise infrastructure that scales easily as these demands continue to grow.” – Charlie Boyle, Vice President, DGX systems, NVIDIA.

Since launch, AIRI has supported hundreds of AI workloads across customers ranging from startups to national security departments to multinational technology conglomerates, and every type of data-driven industry in between.

Critical benefits of AIRI//S include:

• Ease of Use: AIRI//S can be set up, deployed and managed quickly and seamlessly as an end-to-end AI pipeline solution. Not only does AIRI//S ensure that infrastructure teams are not overwhelmed by growing AI requirements, but also that data teams remain productive and spend more time delivering insights and less on worrying about their infrastructure.
• Performance at Any Scale: AIRI//S is optimized out-of-the-box to deliver multi-dimensional performance for all stages of the AI data pipeline, and can seamlessly scale storage and AI compute capabilities, allowing organizations to start their AI journeys at any scale and grow as needed.
• Agile AI Platform: As the AI data science landscape and customer requirements evolve, enterprises can now adapt their AI infrastructure to accelerate time to competitive advantage with faster responses to fluctuating market dynamics.
• Sustainable, Efficient AI Infrastructure: AIRI//S is the first to include Pure Storage’s revolutionary new FlashBlade//S, which enables more powerful, high-performance AI infrastructure in the same footprint by delivering high density, reduced power consumption, and unmatched data center efficiency.

Support for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage is planned in future updates. The innovative architecture of FlashBlade//S includes powerful and modular hardware, making it easier to bring further innovation to the AIRI//S platform as their AI requirements evolve.