Data storage company Pure Storage Inc. is making a play for more artificial intelligence workloads with a new “AI First” infrastructure offering announced today at its Pure//Accelerate 2019 event in Austin this week.
The new AI Data Hub product is billed as an “end-to-end AI pipeline solution” that provides enterprises with the infrastructure they need to design, develop and deploy AI models at large scale.
The platform is based on Pure Storage’s FlashBlade, which is a flash-based file and object storage appliance that enables extremely fast data access, and its AI Ready Infrastructure offering that was built alongside Nvidia Corp. it’s said to deliver some significant improvements in AI productivity while enabling faster time to market and more informed, data-driven models, the company said.
The basic premise is that AI Data Hub can handle every step of the AI pipeline, from cleansing and tagging data to modeling and training, and running trained AI models in production.
“With AIRI powered by Nvidia DGX systems and Pure Storage Flashblade, Nvidia and Pure have been making it faster, easier and more cost-effective for every enterprise to deploy and manage AI at scale,” said Charlie Boyle, vice president and general manager of DGX systems at Nvidia. “The AI Data Hub increases the value of our joint solutions by accelerating data science workflows, powered by Nvidia CUDA-X AI software and DGX systems for faster iteration, with greater developer productivity and accelerated time-to-insight.”
Analyst Dave Vellante of Wikibon, a sister market research company to SiliconANGLE, said this is a key offering for Pure Storage because it means it can take on new, data intensive workloads that it wasn’t really targeting before. And that should be helpful for a company that, like other players in the storage market, has seen its revenue take a hit because of an oversupply of flash storage components that has led to a steep decline in prices.
“In a market with falling NAND prices, this is relevant because it should lead to new opportunities for flash to further encroach on spinning disk,” Vellante said.
Pure Storage also announced a couple of updates to its Cloud Data Services portfolio that should make it easier for customers to move applications to and from public cloud infrastructure platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The new offerings include Cloud Block Store for AWS, an enterprise-grade block storage service that’s delivered natively in the AWS cloud. The idea is to provide a “unified management and consumption experience” for data services hosted on AWS, so the applications that rely on them can run more seamlessly in the cloud.
“Since CBS offers the same APIs and interfaces as on-prem, we’ll be able to use the same automation tools and scripts on AWS as we do with our current FlashArrays, with much shorter timelines and zero retraining expense,” said James Kelly, senior systems administrator at Chapman University, an early adopter of the service. “It is letting us imagine new ways to migrate, access, and manage our data in our hybrid cloud environments, using resources and expertise we already have.”
As for CloudSnap for Azure, it’s all about enabling more intelligent and efficient data transfers to Microsoft’s public cloud platform. CloudSnap is a cloud backup service that’s also available on AWS, providing rapid recovery for both on-premises and cloud hosted applications and services.
“This is all about enabling the cloud experience regardless of where the data lives,” Vellante said. “It’s fundamental for a company that doesn’t own a public cloud to find ways to add value to customers, and bridging clouds with on-premises for a more consistent experience is a good way to do this.”
Pure Storage also used the opportunity to introduce a more unified subscription model for its Pure as-a-Service cloud offerings. Pure’s as-a-service offerings include flash memory storage-based services for multiple public cloud platforms, together with a range of data management and analytics tools. The main benefit for customers consuming its products this way is that they only need pay for the resources they need, when they need them, and can take advantage of the company’s latest upgrades immediately.
Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE
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