Pure Storage upgrades AI platform built on Nvidia DGX systems

Pure Storage announced updates to its AIRI//S line of AI-ready infrastructure, which it co-developed with Nvidia.

The two vendors launched AIRI in 2018, claiming it was the first AI-oriented reference architecture that simplified the process of building an AI infrastructure by connecting compute with storage. AIRI is essentially a combination of Pure’s scale-out FlashBlade//S and Nvidia’s DGX ultra-dense GPU box. Pure provided the storage, and Nvidia provided the compute.

This latest move, unveiled at the Pure//Accelerate techfest22 conference in Los Angeles, is quite an advancement, however.

The new release of AIRI//S is powered by Nvidia DGX A100 systems, featuring end-to-end networking provided by Nvidia’s Quantum InfiniBand and Spectrum networking. A DGX A100 system comes with eight Ampere-generation A100 GPUs and up to ten ConnectX-6 network adapters from Mellanox.

Pure Storage

Support for Nvidia’s Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage is planned in future updates. GPUDirect allows SSD storage to communicate directly with the memory on the GPU rather than having to go through the CPU and main memory, thus lessening the burden on the CPU.

“Traditional approaches to AI infrastructure often result in silos of servers and storage that are either over-spent on capacity or starve AI workloads. With a focus on simplicity and scalability, AIRI//S enables global enterprises to achieve better time to insights and make the most out of their data with AI,” said Amy Fowler, vice president, strategy and solutions, FlashBlade at Pure Storage, in a statement.

FlashBlade//S gets an update

The AIRI news isn’t the only news out of Pure//Accelerate techfest22. The FlashBlade//S product family of file and object storage arrays has been updated with a new modular architecture built on co-designed hardware and software.

The new platform offers more than double the density, performance and power efficiency of previous versions thanks to its modular architecture, which decouples compute, storage, and networking elements. Because the FlashBlade//S disaggregates the elements, customers can scale compute and capacity separately as needed. Both can be upgraded independently and non-disruptively, so you can add more compute to one array if needed and more capacity to another.

FlashBlade//S is sold separately and as part of AIRI//S.

Consumption-based service updates

Lastly, Pure has streamlined its Evergreen subscription service offerings. It launched Evergreen in 2015 as a software subscription contract that includes hardware and software upgrades. It set the stage for the Pure-as-a-Service consumption model launched in 2018.

There are now three Evergreen offerings: Evergreen//Forever (formerly Evergreen Gold), the traditional model where the customer owns the appliance and has a subscription to software and hardware in-place updates at regular intervals; Evergreen//One (formerly Pure-as-a-Service), the consumption-based service model for storage; and Evergreen//Flex, where Pure owns the whole batch of arrays in an on-premises managed services model.