Converged AI and HPC have arrived in 2020 and commercial IT organizations are putting data at the core of their business model. Just in the HPC market alone, Intersect360[1] found that around 90% of HPC organizations were either running machine learning (56%) or investigating/planning its introduction. Gartner[2] claims that 60% of organizations are adapting their business model to AI and a 2019 ESG[3] survey showed that 49% of IT organizations state that “data is their business”, with another 31% expecting to offer datacentric products in the next 2 years.  Yet, how to reliably accomplish that goal often remains elusive.  The same Gartner survey reported a 50% failure rate for these projects.

Performance, as ever, is important and DDN’s EXAScaler systems continue to outperform forthcoming competitor offerings with over 63 Million IOPs per Rack with DDN’s AI400X and over 140GB/s per rack in HDD-only sequential performance. But delivering this performance potential to today’s workloads is the real target. Datacentric organizations are investing heavily in more powerful compute platforms, often relying on GPUs. Keeping systems operating at 100% utilization is not an easy proposition without at-scale experience and concerted engineering effort in optimizing for containerized workloads, AI frameworks, GPU platforms, extreme-scale CPU and fast networks. Underutilized infrastructure is a recipe for failure in a world where competitive stakes are high, investments are large and the amount of data to be analyzed is vast. A data management vendor must deliver performance no matter how large the requirement nor how diverse the applications.

Modern organizations shifting to a data-centric strategy need very large scale data-in-place analytics environments that allow data to be accessible by many different methods for ingestion, labeling, processing, etc. In this rapidly changing and converging ecosystem of AI, Big Data and HPC, fast yet flexible access to all data is a differentiator. Accessing and manipulating that data from workstations and cloud applications require protocols like NFS, SMB, and S3 as well as super-fast Native access. With the demands for data mobility (getting the right data in the right place at the right time), the ability to copy, move or sync data between systems and to third party cloud providers is equally important.

There is a clear priority for organizations to build the right infrastructure for data-centric services and selecting the right vendor partnerships will improve their path to success. Some suppliers struggle with the ability to manage data easily at petabyte scale. Many vendors have neither the focus on scalable data processing nor familiarity with those types of environments. Other vendors can’t deliver consistent performance or reliable large scale solutions. Whilst Data Lakes and pure Big Data approaches are declining due to inflexibility and inefficiency, there is a surge in implementations of true parallel filesystems to address AI, Big Data and HPC challenges. DDN’s EXAScaler is regularly implemented at scales of 100s of Petabytes without the downsides of data duplication and with far higher performance delivered to analytics and AI applications than any object store. EXAScaler brings a simpler experience and a powerful in-built data management engine to ensure businesses can stay agile with their data as new analytics models evolve and their data sets broaden.

The IT infrastructure market is transforming when it comes to data-centric requirements. No longer consigned to a small research group or the high performance computing team, the ability to acquire, analyze, manipulate and distribute data is core to IT operations. Similarly, the landscape of vendors to consider is undergoing significant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or other market realities. Selecting a proven, stable and trusted partner with a track record of innovation to meet at-scale needs is an important first step to becoming a data-driven organization or informing the next market-changing AI application.

About DDN

DDN ranks #1 for HPC Storage deployments[4] at scale and holds a leadership position in AI and HPC with over 10 EXAbytes of shipped capacity and 150+ patents in data management. Recently awarded “Top 5 vendors to watch”[5] for our A³I product line and capability advances in the EXA5 platforms DDN continues to invest in innovation focussed on our customer’s forward path. As stated by IDC[6], “Increasingly, parallelization is the preferred approach, with AI infrastructure starting to resemble HPC infrastructure”. With a market leading 16% of revenues invested back into our R&D, DDN’s accelerated cadence of innovation in our parallel filesystems for AI and HPC is second to none.

Why is DDN EXA5 your undisputed filesystem of choice for the new converged world of AI and HPC?

#1 DDN Delivers the best customer experience. DDN is a long-term dependable partner with the technical expertise that improves time to value and accelerates your productivity.

#2 EXA5 Performance and Scale Leadership – DDN platforms attain the highest performance efficiency.

#3 EXA5 Capability – EXA5 brings the capabilities needed for converged AI and HPC – MultiCloud, Data Aware Intelligence, Global Collaboration and Strong Security including Multi Tenancy support

The DDN Customer Experience

DDN is different because our focus is different. That focus is wholly on our 7000 customers and their data challenges. Our customers benefit by partnering with DDN for storage alongside compute vendors, bringing DDN’s unique expertise in storage. With a DDN storage strategy, businesses can escape from monolithic proprietary systems, mitigating against spiralling license costs and retaining their control in getting the best return on investment.

“With the goal of expanding the boundaries of science as we know it today, we are excited about the arrival of advanced new technology that can dramatically increase the performance at scale of our systems, and specifically of our new Top 10 supercomputer, Frontera. DDN’s new EXA5 has the power to provide the best I/O performance our users have ever experienced, and greatly reduce the I/O bottlenecks in large scale computation. We believe that EXA5 will play a role in many of the ground breaking discoveries scientists will make with Frontera.” – Dan Stanzione, executive director, Texas Advanced Computing Center.

DDN brings the skills of more than 1000 technical staff, all focussed on storage and data management. With filesystem engineering teams that contribute tens of thousands of lines of code each year[7] to our open filesystems, field teams that deliver the largest tiered storage into top 10 supercomputers[8][9]and global operations that support billions of dollars of infrastructure, DDN is the largest privately held storage company in the world. Now with DDN’s rapid expansion into Enterprise[10] we have dramatically added our ability to accelerate your entire infrastructure.

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[1] Intersect360, HPC User Site Census: Storage Suppliers, May 2019

[2] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45344519

[3] ESG Master Survey Results, 2019 Data Storage Trends, November 2019

[4] Intersect360 Research, ibid.

[5] https://www.ddn.com/press-releases/ddn-honored-top-five-vendor-watch-annual-datanami-awards/

[6] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=DR2019_T2_PR

[7] http://cdn.opensfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/LUG2019-Community-Release-Update-Jones.pdf

[8] https://www.ddn.com/blog/tacc-frontera-helping-make-impossible-possible/

[9] http://lustrefs.cn/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Lustre-Persistent-Cache-on-Client-for-AI-Machine-Learning-and-Bigdata-Processing.pdf

[10] https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/10/09/ddn-uses-acquisitions-to-grow-in-the-enterprise/

found that around 90% of HPC organizations were either running machine learning (56%) or investigating/planning its introduction. Read more…

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