Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Note from Editor:

Big Community found this move into AI as an interesting venture for Pure Storage. A positive direction towards making a distinction for themselves this year. We spoke to David Wirt, Vice President, ASEAN & Greater China, Pure Storage to get a better idea on this recent Flash offering.

“Data is at the centre of the modern analytics revolution, and unstructured data is on the rise. Organisations are increasingly running data-intensive storage workloads across various applications, from real-time and big data analytics, to financial analysis and advanced analytics in professional sports. Additionally, organisations are transitioning from analysing historical data in the classic batch mode towards real-time and iterative analytics. Big data has now transformed to big and fast data, and they need to be delivered to parallel processors quickly to train AI algorithms faster and more accurately.”

Every organisation seems to be finding their niche in how they will leverage on AI. But the window of opportunity won’t be there forever. Pure has made swift moves to solidify their name in the era while the iron is hot. That sounds to us like a sound management decision and bold move for progress.

The original article follows.

Pure Storage announced the industry’s first comprehensive AI-Ready Infrastructure, AIRI, powered by NVIDIA. Architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI is purpose-built to enable data architects, scientists and business leaders to extend the power of the NVIDIA DGX-1 and operationalize AI-at-scale for every enterprise. With AIRI, cloud, enterprise and government organizations can accelerate time-to-insight and bring new, impactful innovations to humanity, faster.

AIRI enables organizations to turn data into innovation at an unprecedented pace. AI represents an opportunity for enterprises to innovate not only at a product level, but within day-to-day operations as they lead their industries through periods of tremendous change. According to Gartner, 80 percent of enterprises will deploy AI by 2020. AIRI provides a simple, yet powerful, architecture that empowers organizations with the data-centric infrastructure needed to harness the true power of AI.

“AI has fantastic potential for aiding humanity,” said Charles Giancarlo, CEO, Pure Storage. “It has the capacity to significantly improve the quality of all of our lives.  Safer autonomous vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives and make us more efficient. AI-driven advances in life sciences have made preventative healthcare a current reality rather than a vague future possibility.  AI will provide highly personalized experiences for the consumer, while keeping online communities safer.  AIRI will accelerate AI research, enabling innovators to more rapidly make advances to create a better world with data.”

Engineered as a fully integrated software and hardware solution by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI shatters infrastructure complexities that hold organizations back from deploying AI-at-scale. AIRI is powered by Pure Storage FlashBlade^TM, the industry’s first storage platform architected for modern analytics and AI, and four NVIDIA DGX-1 supercomputers, delivering four petaFLOPS of performance with NVIDIA^® Tesla^® V100 GPUs. These systems are interconnected with Arista 100GbE switches, supporting GPUDirect RDMA for maximum distributed training performance. AIRI is supported by the NVIDIA GPU Cloud deep learning stack and Pure Storage AIRI Scaling Toolkit, enabling data scientists to jumpstart their AI initiatives in hours, not weeks or months.

“Businesses everywhere are scaling-up AI infrastructure to attack their most important challenges and opportunities,” said Jim McHugh, Vice President and General Manager of Deep Learning Systems at NVIDIA. “With AIRI, our customers get a validated approach that brings together industry-leading compute and high-performance storage with proven results.”

AIRI is the ultimate solution to empower data architects and scientists to deliver time-to-insight at scale. Every organization generates and stores troves of data. Now more than ever, innovators require additional insight from that information to make their businesses smarter.

“AI has evolved from hypothetical future technology to a business-critical strategic asset. There is increased adoption of AI across all verticals, driving new business models, sharper value propositions, more efficient processes, and personalized user experiences,” said Ritu Jyoti, Research Director, Infrastructure: Cognitive/AI and Big Data Analytics Workloads, IDC.  “Innovative technologies  from Pure Storage and NVIDIA have enabled the accelerated adoption of AI, and together they provide organizations with an optimized, easy-to-use and robust solution for any AI workload.”

Paige.AI is an organization focused on revolutionizing clinical diagnosis and treatment in oncology through the use of AI. Pathology is the cornerstone of most cancer diagnoses. Yet most pathologic diagnoses rely on manual, subjective processes developed more than a century ago. By leveraging the potential of AI, Paige.AI aims to transform the pathology and diagnostics industry from highly qualitative to a more rigorous, quantitative discipline.

“Data is the fuel driving the AI revolution. With access to one of the world’s largest tumor pathology archives, we needed the most advanced deep learning infrastructure available to quickly turn massive amounts of data into clinically-validated AI applications,” said Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Founder and Chief Science Officer, Paige.AI. “That’s when we turned to NVIDIA DGX-1 and Pure Storage FlashBlade. The powerful combination of DGX-1 and FlashBlade accelerates our mission to catalyze the medical industry with AI.”

ElementAI, a platform for companies to build AI solutions and founded by Yoshua Bengio, one of the three pioneers in deep learning, sees AIRI as an accelerant for complex AI projects like the ones they’ve designed and delivered for organizations across every industry.

“AIRI represents an exciting breakthrough for AI adoption in the enterprise, shattering the barrier of infrastructure complexities and clearing the path to jumpstart any organization’s AI initiative,” said Jeremy Barnes, Chief Architect, ElementAI. “AIRI is built with the same core solutions ElementAI uses extensively both internally and with its customers — the NVIDIA DGX-1 and Pure Storage FlashBlade. We are excited to work hand-in-hand with NVIDIA and Pure Storage to accelerate time-to-value for our clients and facilitate our mission of bringing AI to all enterprises.”

For organizations like Global Response, AI represents an opportunity to reinvent existing business models. With the help of Pure Storage and NVIDIA, Global Response has begun development on a state-of-the-art call center system that allows for the real-time transcription and analysis of customer support calls. This will allow for a superior customer experience and faster solutions — both increasingly important as consumer expectations shift heavily toward personalized experience.

“We’ve reached an inflection point where integration of AI throughout our organization is critical to the ongoing success of our business,” said Stephen Shooster, Co-CEO, Global Response. “While we wanted to move quickly, infrastructure for AI was slowing us down because it is very complex to deploy. To truly operationalize AI at scale, we needed to build a simple foundation powerful enough to support the entire organization. AIRI is that foundation. All of the question marks and complexities associated with AI are solved, with a solution that integrates state-of-the-art software and hardware to enable our teams to get up and running in hours, not weeks or months.”

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