Dell Technologies announced plans to help customers achieve faster AI and generative AI (GenAI) performance with new enterprise data storage advancements and validation with the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI infrastructure.
“Storage performance is a critical factor for successful AI and generative AI outcomes,” said Arthur Lewis, President, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. “Customers are relying on us to continually push the boundaries of storage innovation, including removing data access bottlenecks that limit the throughput and scalability of compute-intensive applications. We are addressing these needs by delivering fast, efficient and secure access to data and turning it into a proverbial goldmine of AI and GenAI possibilities.”
New advancements from Dell PowerScale scale-out file storage system are designed to address increasing customer demand for higher AI and GenAI performance.
Now, with PowerScale OneFS software enhancements, companies can prepare, train, fine-tune and inference AI models more quickly. With new PowerScale all-flash storage systems – which are based on latest-generation Dell PowerEdge servers – Dell claims that customers will see up to a 2X performance increase for streaming reads and writes.
PowerScale will offer a new smart scale-out capability to improve single compute node performance for enhanced GPU utilization, leading to faster storage throughput for AI training, checkpointing and inferencing.
“Dell continues to design its file and object storage solutions with the customer in mind, allowing them to modernize their infrastructure with an AI-ready foundation to support the most intensive workloads, such as generative AI,” said Scott Sinclair, Practice Director, Enterprise Strategy Group. “With PowerScale’s latest performance advances, customers can improve AI model training and fine-tuning to make better business decisions based on their data wherever it resides with increased speed and accuracy.”
Through Dell’s collaboration with NVIDIA, meanwhile, customers can take advantage of a validated combination of NVIDIA DGX systems, Dell PowerScale storage and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand and Spectrum Ethernet networking, to achieve faster and more efficient AI storage. Dell’s solution is expected to be the first ethernet storage solution validated on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD.
With Dell PowerScale becoming validated for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NVIDIA’s turnkey data center AI infrastructure solution, customers will be able to confidently accelerate their AI and GenAI initiatives with Dell’s industry-leading network-attached storage. NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD includes the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform to provide a full-stack, secure and stable AI supercomputing solution.
Dell APEX File Storage for Microsoft Azure, the latest addition to the Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud portfolio, delivers enterprise-class file performance and management capabilities in Microsoft Azure. Customers will be able to easily meet the needs of performance-intensive AI and machine learning applications like Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Vision.
Dell APEX File Storage in AWS and Azure allows customers to take advantage of cloud-native AI and GenAI workflows on data in public clouds or on premises with improved data access and movement. For example, through Dell’s expanding Databricks collaboration, customers can choose from a variety of large language models (LLMs) and use libraries from Databricks MosaicML to retrain a foundational model with their proprietary data stored in Dell APEX File Storage, offering flexibility across multicloud environments.
The Databricks collaboration builds on Dell’s data management ecosystem partnerships to help customers accelerate AI and analytics efforts. Additionally, with Dell’s planned open, modern data lakehouse, customers can extract insights from data wherever it resides with the integration of Starburst’s analytics software with Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerScale, Dell ECS and Dell ObjectScale file and object storage systems.
Availability
The Dell PowerScale OneFS software enhancements will be globally available this month.
Next-generation all-flash Dell PowerScale systems and new smart scale-out feature will be globally available in the first half of 2024. Dell PowerScale is being validated with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, with expected completion in the first quarter of 2024. Dell APEX for File Storage for Microsoft Azure will be globally available in the first half of 2024. Dell APEX for File Storage integration with Databricks and MosaicML is available in AWS today and in Microsoft Azure in the first half of 2024. The Dell open, modern data lakehouse solution will be globally available in the first half of 2024.
Additional Resources
- Learn more about the Dell AI-Ready Platform
- Learn more about Dell PowerScale
- Learn more about Dell Data Management
- Blog: Dell Named File and Object Storage Market Leader
- Blog: AI Anywhere on Data Everywhere
- Connect with Dell on X and LinkedIn
