PEAK:AIO, maker of a dedicated AI storage infrastructure server software, has released a new version of its AI Data Server, with emphasis on performance, density, and sustainability.
PEAK:AIO is a software defined storage platform designed running on Dell Technologies’ PowerEdge R7525 2U server with up to 24x NVMe drives. Thanks to new high capacity 61TB drives from Solidigm, the server provides 1.5PB of storage and 120GB/sec RDMA NFS and NVMe-oF performance.
The server also comes with Nvidia’s Mellanox CX7’s next-gen cryptographic networking technology for data protection, a major concern in AI data processing, the vendor said.
By focusing on energy efficiency, PEAKLAIO claims to be six times more energy efficient than the competition, although that was without naming names. By minimizing power consumption and cooling requirements the servers are ideal for both edge applications and massive scale-out deployments, the company stated.
“This is what supplies the GPUs with the data at the speed they need to be supplied up without overloading your power supply, taking up all your rack or most of your budget,” said Mark Klarzynski, co-founder and chief strategic officer for PEAK:AIO.
Klarzynski says traditional NAS-based storage servers are fine for serving a few hundred machine, and HPC systems were good for thousands of nodes, “but then AI came along, and suddenly you’ve got a million nodes in one system. And so the whole protocol and the way the GPUs request data is considerably different,” he said.
There is also the fact that many people working with AI are not IT professionals, such as professors, biochemists, scientists, doctors, clinicians, and they don’t have a traditional enterprise department or a data center. “It’s run by people that wouldn’t really know, nor want to know, what storage is,” he said.
While the new AI Data Server is a Dell design, PEAK:AIO has worked with Lenovo, Supermicro, and HPE as well as Dell over the past four years, offering to convert their off the shelf storage servers into hyper fast, very AI-specific, cheap, specific storage servers that work with all the protocols at Nvidia, like NVLink, along with NFS and NVMe over Fabric.
It also greatly increased storage capacity by going with 61TB drives from Solidigm. SSDs from the major server vendors typically maxed out at 15TB, according to the vendor.
PEAK:AIO competes with VAST, WekaIO, NetApp, Pure Storage and many others in the growing AI workload storage arena.
PEAK:AIO’s AI Data Server is available now.
Source:: Network World