Olympus Medical Selects Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that Olympus Corporation, provider of endoscopes and other medical devices, selected AIRI, Pure’s reference architecture for AI, to contribute to the rapid provision of AI development for the company.

AIRI, an AI infrastructure jointly architected using Pure Storage FlashBlade and NVIDIA DGX-1 Systems, gives Olympus the speed, scalability, and flexibility it needs to continuously develop and deploy data-intensive applications. The FlashBlade Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO) platform hosts hundreds of terabytes of data, feeding images and other data into AI and ML models to produce increasingly accurate results over time.

When Olympus introduced AIRI into its architecture, they also introduced on-demand storage provisioning for containerized environments. Pure’s proactive support has enabled the launch of a container-based AI development platform and environment, while helping to drive more efficient use of resources overall. This has increased the delivery speed of the AI development environment, empowering developers with self-service capabilities. In addition, Pure’s FlashBlade and Evergreen Storage solutions proved to be a meaningful benefit by supporting swift upgrades without downtime. Developers are freed from the burden of resource management in the AI development environment.

“In R&D related to AI, a large amount of image data is generated and the infrastructure for storing it is becoming more important. In addition, as the number of AI development themes has increased, an environment that efficiently uses GPU resources has become necessary,” said Shuta Yanagita, software strategy manager, software strategy, Olympus. “Therefore, the preparation of a flexible AI development environment that solves these issues was a challenge.“

With 70% of the global market share for gastrointestinal endoscopes, at Olympus, the amount of data handled in AI development is steadily increasing, and it is expected that the storage capacity will expand moving forward. It is also being discussed with the expectation that the usage rate by AI developers will increase in the future.

“There is enormous potential for AI-driven innovation in healthcare. We’re thrilled that Olympus is using AIRI to advance the field of medicine and help doctors around the world,” said Yoshiyuki Tanaka, president, Japan, Pure Storage.

By leveraging Pure, the customer has been able to speed time to market for innovative solutions. With the integration of AIRI and Red Hat OpenShift, its developers can spin up development environments and simplify storage delivery to container-native applications using Red Hat OpenShift. It helps Olympus launch applications sooner and explore the virtually limitless possibilities for solving global healthcare challenges.