NetApp ONTAP AI Is One Of The First Reference Architectures With Mellanox Spectrum Switches
Mike McNamara
Assembly and integration of off-the-shelf deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) compute, storage, networking, and software components can increase your system’s complexity and lengthen deployment times. As a result, your valuable data science resources are wasted on systems integration work. It’s difficult to achieve predictable and scalable artificial intelligence (AI) performance, and keeping a DL and ML infrastructure up and running requires you to have deep, full-stack AI expertise.
NetApp can help you fully realize the promise of AI by simplifying, accelerating, and integrating your data pipeline with the NetApp® ONTAP® AI proven architecture. ONTAP AI is powered by NVIDIA DGX servers and NetApp cloud-connected all-flash storage.
And it keeps getting better. NetApp ONTAP AI is now supported and has been tested with Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet Switches. With NetApp, you can now deploy the first reference architecture for AI and machine learning (ML) with NVIDIA DGX-1 servers and Mellanox Ethernet switches.
This architecture consists of nine DGX-1 servers with a single NetApp AFF A800 all-flash storage system, and you get perfectly linear performance scalability of up to 72 GPUs. Mellanox Spectrum Ethernet Switches with Onyx OS give your system high bandwidth and low latency. You get full Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) feature support so that you can use RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for GPU interconnect.
Based on the validation testing results, the ONTAP AI architecture delivers excellent training and inferencing performance. The results also demonstrate adequate storage headroom to support additional DGX-1 systems that you might want to deploy. You can easily and independently scale your compute and storage resources from half-rack to multirack configurations and achieve predictable performance to meet any of your ML workload requirements. For more details about the testing, read the NetApp Verified Architecture report.
Mike McNamara
Mike McNamara is a senior product and solution marketing leader at NetApp with over 25 years of data management and cloud storage marketing experience. Before joining NetApp over ten years ago, Mike worked at Adaptec, Dell EMC, and HPE. Mike was a key team leader driving the launch of a first-party cloud storage offering and the industry’s first cloud-connected AI/ML solution (NetApp), unified scale-out and hybrid cloud storage system and software (NetApp), iSCSI and SAS storage system and software (Adaptec), and Fibre Channel storage system (EMC CLARiiON).
In addition to his past role as marketing chairperson for the Fibre Channel Industry Association, he is a member of the Ethernet Technology Summit Conference Advisory Board, a member of the Ethernet Alliance, a regular contributor to industry journals, and a frequent event speaker. Mike also published a book through FriesenPress titled "Scale-Out Storage - The Next Frontier in Enterprise Data Management" and was listed as a top 50 B2B product marketer to watch by Kapos.
