Artificial intelligence? yawns DDN. That's just the new HPC, isn't it?

DDN is upping array capacities and access speeds with one eye on its traditional HPC customer base and the other on businesses that are testing or deploying deep learning architectures. AI, or perhaps more accurately Machine Learning, could be a gift that keeps on giving for storage and systems players as customers try to …

[JohnMartin]

Nope, and more Nope ..

"900TB in 4U (225TB/U storage density – better than the SFA200NV/400NV) and, with the four supported 4U x 90 bay expansion cabs, 4.5PB in a rack. That's better storage density compared to flash and it's cheaper."

AF700 is 4U an can hold 24 30TB drives .. raw capacity is 720 TB, then add say four of the 24 drive expansion shelves at 2U each ... with an average raw density of 360 TB/RU .. and you've got 12RU with 720 + 4* 360 and you've got a petabyte of raw storage in 12RU

Now take off some capacity for RAID etc which is probably going to be more or less the same for DDN and ONTAP, and then add on the 4.7:1 average savings from dedupe, compression, and clones and you're looking at about 4 Petabtytes of storage in 12 RU vs 4.5 in a whole rack.

Flash WINS !!!

Also ... deep learning performance is rarely about raw storage throughput .. you can choke the GPUs in a DGX-1 with less than 2 gigabytes per second of throughput, and thats with a _lightweight_ learning model, the really deep stuff rarely goes much above 500MB/sec for 8 of the biggest baddest GPU cards... HPC workflows and architectures != Deep Learning, so sorry DDN, fast'n'cheap isn't really going to be nearly as compelling in AI as it was in HPC.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nope, and more Nope ..

I'm not sure why this is a bad thing, for any computationally expensive and storage hungry process. A company have evolved their kit. Baby steps and all that. What's the issue? Marketing? Relative privation?

[JohnMartin]

Re: Nope, and more Nope ..

I’ve got no beef with DDN bumping up their speeds and feeds, but it simply doesn’t have much relevance to machine learning and deep learning (which is what most people mean when they talk AI these days)

Unlike traditional HPC Ai / ML simply isn’t that hungry in terms of throughput, so the improvements aren’t really that relevant .. it bugs me because I have to spend too much of my time injecting some reality into the actual storage and data management requirements for ML and DL data pipelines and weaning the HPC folks who are increasingly being tasked with specifying ML/DL solutions off their storage bandwidth addiction .. deconstructing hype like this gets tiring so I get narky when I see it happen over and over again.

Also asserting that spinning rust is denser than flash is just silly, especially when the things you do to try to make it true increases the AFR of the spinning rust and makes it more difficult to swap out the drives when they do fail.

and in the interest of full disclosure I work for Netapp with a particular focus on AI/DL solutions and data pipelines.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nope, and more Nope ..

You seem to spend a lot of energy and words, on something you claim is not relevant.

Say I come and try sell you a product, as long as I don’t make stupid claims, it’s fair you saying “I am not interested”, “ I don’t need it”.

However, you seem to want to prove them wrong, as if they did a crime by trying to sell a solution for AI.

Pure is fine but ddn is bad, cause it’s roots are at HPC ? Did u see a claim that AI is HPC ?

Try to have concrete reasons to disapprove when the time comes, and not because of sheer negativism.

[tanpot]

Re: Nope, and more Nope ..

So what is true benefit from Netapp's AI solution? Say bandwidth requirement only 500MB/s...

[Teiwaz]

But what catchy name can Marketing give it?

If 'artificial intelligence' becomes a worn-out hype word long before it actually exists.

Spare a moment for the shame an ridicule some future hardworking boffins when they announce 'true artificial intelligence' only to receive a 'pfff, that's so twenty-teens, man.

Remember when you were a kid, and that toy in the ads that look so brilliant, but when you got it it was just some molded plastic...? That's Life....