Pure AIRI Mini: Complete AI-Ready Infrastructure

Pure Storage, Inc. announced its second AI-Ready Infrastructure offering, AIRI Mini, powered by Nvidia Corporation.

AIRI Mini

Architected by the company 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, organizations 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 any organization.

AI represents an unprecedented opportunity for organizations 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 organizations to get started, and scales easily as their AI initiatives grow.

“The vast majority of business leaders understand the incredible opportunity presented by AI. Yet implementation complexities often hold their AI initiatives back from moving forward,” said Matt Burr, GM, FlashBlade, Pure. “While AIRI simplifies AI infrastructure for initiatives at any scale, AIRI Mini offers a powerful and affordable entry point for organizations to explore and scale as they grow into AI. AIRI Mini removes the final barriers for any organization to leverage AI, and scales as AI workloads grow.“

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Engineered as an integrated software and hardware solution by the company and Nvidia, AIRI Mini provides a simple architecture that empowers organizations with the data-centric infrastructure needed to harness the power of AI.

“Organizations require infrastructure purpose-built for AI, a system that’s easy to get started with and scales with their efforts,” said Jim McHugh, VP and GM, Nvidia. “Both FlashBlade and DGX-1 are designed to scale seamlessly into te future, enabling customers to grow quickly and build upon their AI success.“

AIRI Mini is powered by one FlashBlade, a storage platform architected for modern analytics and AI, configured with 7x17TB 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 AIRI Scaling Toolkit, optimized 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.

The firm also announced that both AIRI and AIRI Mini are available with Nexus9000 100GbE switches from Cisco Technology, Inc. Cisco and the company’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, Moor Insights and Strategy. “Organizations 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 organizations without enterprise resources an on-ramp to AI that’s simple, performant and ready to deliver value within days.“

AIRI and AIRI Mini are a converged infrastructure solutions purpose-built for AI, empowering data architects and scientists to deliver time-to-insight at scale. As organizations 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.

UnternehmerTUM GmbH, a large innovation and entrepreneurship centers in Europe, supports founders and start-ups from their initial idea all the way to IPO. The German non-profit has joined forces with a number of leading organizations for the appliedAI initiative, which is supported by the FlashBlade and Nvidia DGX-1.

“The appliedAI initiative is all about accelerating start-ups and the adoption of AI in industry as well as society. Our aim is to democratize AI by helping people understand the challenges and opportunities presented by this technology and to put it into practice,” said Andreas Liebl, MD and head, appliedAI Initiative, UnternehmerTUM. “A critical part of this is having the right technical infrastructure in place, which is why we have chosen Pure Storage and Nvidia as technology partners. Pure Storage stands out in terms of technical excellence, especially when it comes to fast access to weighty data sets. By implementing Pure’s FlashBlade in combination with the Nvidia DGX-1 deep learning platform, we know we’ve selected one of the most innovative solutions on the market to enable our partner companies, individuals and Germany’s best AI start-ups to experiment with real-life AI and machine learning use cases.“

AIRI and AIRI Mini are available through select reseller partners.

Resources:
Meet AIRI, your first AI-Ready Infrastructure at Scale
Blog: How to Cross the AI Chasm: From Vision to an AI-First Business
Blog: Pure Storage & NVIDIA Join Forces to Bring AI-at-Scale for Enterprises

Read also:
Pure Storage AIRI/AI-Ready Infrastructure Powered by Nvidia
Built on FlashBlade and Nvidia DGX-1 with Arista Networks 100GbE switches
2018.04.06 | Press Release