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January 21, 2021

VAST Data Unveils Joint Reference Architecture with NVIDIA for Large-scale AI Workloads

NEW YORK, Jan. 21, 2021 – VAST Data, a storage company, today announced a new reference architecture based on NVIDIA DGX A100 systems and VAST Data’s Universal Storage platform. This reference architecture is designed to significantly increase storage performance for AI use cases such as large-scale training of conversational AI models and petabyte-scale data analytics. Jointly designed, built and tested by NVIDIA and VAST Data, the reference architecture eliminates the guesswork of building a solution from the ground up by providing enterprises with a turnkey petabyte-scale AI infrastructure solution that maximizes performance without adding needless cost and complexity.

Historically, enterprises have been forced to choose between two specific infrastructure configurations based on workload (i.e. GPU-intensive or storage-intensive), but as applications and data science teams’ requirements evolve, that infrastructure choice may limit and negatively impact performance. Built on VAST Data’s recently released LightSpeed platform and NVIDIA’s universal AI system, DGX A100, the architecture leverages VAST’s unique capabilities such as NFS-over-RDMA, NFS Multipath, and support for NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage as well as a converged fabric design. The joint reference architecture delivers more than 140GB/s of throughput for both GPU-intensive and storage-intensive AI workloads.

“For the first time, enterprises, and more importantly data science teams, are no longer constrained by the limitations of rigid infrastructure configurations,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-founder and CMO at VAST Data. “We’ve worked with NVIDIA on this new reference architecture, built on our LightSpeed platform, to provide customers a flexible, turnkey, petabyte-scale AI infrastructure solution and to remove the variables that have introduced compromise into storage environments for decades.”

For more information on VAST’s GPU Reference Architecture, including specific tests showcasing both infrastructure level microbenchmarks as well as benchmarks representative of real-world AI training workloads, please visit https://vastdata.com/gpu-reference-architecture/.

VAST Data AI-Ready Ecosystem Quotes 

Organizations looking to take advantage of AI can now access AI assessments to guide them as they build out and deploy high-throughput AI architectures based on NVIDIA DGX systems and VAST LightSpeed storage with the following resellers today.

“We offer a diverse and unique portfolio of full stack technology platforms. As our team of data scientists, DevOps, and solution architects work with enterprises to build out and manage their applications and pipelines from end to end, we are constantly looking for ways to provide the performance needed for innovative organizations. We’re seeing significant interest with VAST in multi-petabyte solutions looking to increase technology adoption while removing complexity.” – Stan Wysocki, President at Mark III Systems.

“Providing clients the resources, ideas, and expertise needed to leverage cutting-edge technologies to drive their business forward is our core tenet. We’re constantly identifying new capabilities that can help our clients optimize their workflows and overcome the cost, capacity, scale, and resilience challenges they’ve been facing for decades. VAST and NVIDIA’s joint reference architecture provides these capabilities for mission-critical enterprises that want to transcend the limitations of rigid infrastructure configurations.” – Jose Alvarez, Director of Industrial and Scientific Computing at Cambridge Computer Services.

About VAST Data

Headquartered in New York City, VAST Data is a storage company bringing an end to complex storage tiering and HDD usage in the enterprise. VAST consolidates applications onto a highly scalable all-flash storage system to meet the performance needs of the most demanding workloads, while also redefining the economics of flash infrastructure to finally make it affordable enough to store all of your data on flash. Since its launch in February 2019, VAST has established itself as the fastest selling storage startup in history. VAST’s Universal Storage now powers several of the world’s leading data centric computing centers. For more information, please visit https://www.vastdata.com


Source: VAST Data

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