MinIO and F5 Partnership to Enhance AI Workloads with Object Storage and Distributed Application Services

MinIO, Inc. announced a strategic partnership with F5, Inc.

This collaboration unites MinIO’s scalable storage solutions with F5’s high-performance traffic management and security technologies to enhance AI workloads, especially at exascale levels.

Together, the 2 companies will address unique challenges of large-scale AI deployments by providing optimized data flow, security, and hybrid and multicloud networking.

MinIO’s recently launched AIStor was built for AI and ML workloads and works out of the box with every major AI/ML technology. It is a world’s fastest object store with GETs/PUTs benchmark results that exceed 2.2TB/s and 1.0TB/s on 260 nodes of NVMe drives and a 100GbE network. From predictive models to GenAI, MinIO delivers the performance and scalability to power the AI enterprise.

“In partnering with MinIO on massive AI-centric workloads, we have seen first-hand their ability to deliver performance at scale at hundreds of petabytes,” said Mike Rau, SVP, technical enterprise strategy and business development, F5. “The ability to create reference architectures and product integrations to solve customer problems at this scale with F5’s exceptional high-performing traffic management and security solutions offers a robust and comprehensive answer to the challenges facing organizations building large-scale S3 object stores.”

F5 BIG-IP, F5 Distributed Cloud Services, and F5 NGINX offerings provide the security, network connectivity, deployment flexibility, and traffic management needed to connect, secure, and manage AI/ML apps and workloads in the cloud, at the edge, or in the F5 Global Network. Highly scalable, high-performance traffic load balancing can deliver layer 4/7 throughput of 3+Tb/s on 32 blades of F5 VELOS. F5 also recently announce  a collaboration with Nvidia to deploy BIG-IP on Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs to help optimize large-scale AI infrastructure while also freeing up CPU resources.

“The scale associated with modern AI workloads is orders of magnitude larger than what we saw even 24 months ago,” said Manjusha Gangadharan, head sales and partnerships, MinIO. “Working with F5 gives our joint customers the opportunity to leverage best in class networking, unparalleled security and cutting-edge traffic management. MinIO and F5 are cornerstones of large-scale data infrastructure and are mission critical for successful private cloud AI deployments, as we have seen in production.”

As organizations increasingly adopt AI-driven solutions, the demand for efficient data storage and management is paramount. This partnership will empower enterprises to harness the full potential of their AI initiatives by ensuring reliable access to data while maintaining the performance and security required for sensitive workloads.

Key highlights of technology collaboration:

• Optimized Data Flow for AI and Advanced Analytics Workloads: Integration ensures high-speed, data flow and scalability to meet the requirements of exascale AI deployments, for storing and processing large datasets used in advanced analytics and AI applications.
• Robust AI Security Measures: F5’s security solutions provide protection for AI-driven applications, offering organizations peace of mind as they scale AI/ML infrastructure to production levels.
• Streamlined Data Ingestion and Management: Deployed anywhere – public cloud, private cloud, on-prem, or edge – MinIO and F5 enable data to be securely stored and managed across a distributed infrastructure, empowering organizations to keep data close to where it’s generated for optimal performance.
• Efficient and Secure Data Collection from the Edge: F5 Distributed Cloud Mesh and global traffic management facilitate secure, efficient data ingestion from the edge back to a MinIO-based central data lake for AI model training, business intelligence, and data analytics.

Real world use case: Exascale data collection and management
As industries increasingly rely on automation, vast amounts of data are generated from sensors, cameras, and other telemetry systems. This data is critical for AI modeling to advance autonomous capabilities. A global manufacturing company is taking advantage of the MinIO and F5 partnership by using F5’s secure traffic management to collect, transmit, and safeguard data efficiently in real time, directly from the edge to a central data lake. This central repository, based on MinIO, serves as the foundation for AI model training, where data is analyzed to enhance edge system perception, decision-making, and overall system performance.

With the combined power of F5 and MinIO solutions, enterprises are equipped to tackle the challenges of AI exascale data management head-on, ensuring their AI applications run smoother, faster, and more securely than ever before.