Voice Recognition Provider MediaZen in South Korea Chooses Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. announced that MediaZen, an AI-based voice recognition provider in South Korea, is leveraging FlashBlade, its unified fast file and object storage platform, to accelerate time to market for new AI services and enhance R&D capabilities that propel AI innovation and competitiveness.

Customer challenge
MediaZen’s voice recognition solutions serve customers across industries including automotive, education, public service, retail, and telecommunications. Driven by operations in its NAMZ Language Engineering Research Institute and the Magok R&D Center, MediaZen is at the cutting edge of AI-enabled voice recognition technologies, with a goal to become the provider of AI services in South Korea.

In order to accelerate innovation across its AI R&D capabilities, the company required a storage solution that could develop faster training data and combine training results in its AI advancement research tasks. However, MediaZen faced difficulties scaling GPU clusters due to the limited flexibility of its legacy storage solution, as well as the inability to process large volumes of unstructured data and AI workloads effectively. 

Customer impact
MediaZen selected FlashBlade for its performance parallel processing architecture, I/O performance, and simple management and upgradability.

Benefits Pure delivers to MediaZen include:

• Accelerated Time to Market: MediaZen has reduced voice recognition modeling tasks that previously took up to 12 months to 2 weeks (96% enhancement) with FlashBlade, and new speech recognition models were created in 4 weeks with high-speed shared storage that can support a multi-GPU distributed processing environment.
• Simple, Efficient Storage Management: Data movement between GPUs and storage, and within shared storage environments, can be processed at high speeds, while integrated networking reduces storage complexity and enables operation of compute and storage environments with no extra headcount.
• Enhanced R&D Capabilities to Propel AI Innovation: With FlashBlade, MediaZen created an infrastructure environment to advance its AI R&D and to develop and expand services that are specific to market needs, providing a foundation for global growth. As a result, it has seen growth by providing diverse markets with AI-powered voice and language services.
  

“With FlashBlade, MediaZen now has the infrastructure to advance its AI services to meet current and future market demands. Tasks involving STT modeling that would have taken up to 12 months to complete using the legacy equipment were completed in just 2 weeks with the aid of Pure Storage’s solutions. We at MediaZen are thrilled with the superb performance of FlashBlade, and the simple operation and maintenance of it that requires no additional headcount to manage,” said Yoon JongSung, deputy director, NAMZ AI R&D group, MediaZen.

“The AI era has arrived, and the need for modern all-flash storage systems to support large-scale AI workloads and advanced data analytics is increasing daily. To support market leaders including MediaZen innovating and growing their businesses, we at Pure Storage will deliver higher performance, capacity density, and reliability with our differentiated flash technology,” said Jaesung Yoo, MD, Pure Storage Korea. 

Case study: MediaZen Drives AI Innovation in Voice Recognition