Partner POV | Embracing the AI revolution: NetApp AIPod with NVIDIA OVX

This article was written by Sriram Sagi, Principal Product Manager for FlexPod, and contributed by our partner, NetApp.

Throughout history, infrastructure has always played a role in driving human progress. The industrial revolution relied on factories, the automobile age thrived on roads and highways, aviation took off with airports and runways, and the tech revolution exploded with the innovations of the internet and cloud. Now, as we find ourselves on the brink of the AI revolution, it's clear that a new kind of infrastructure is needed – one that can support the dynamic nature of AI applications. We are at an exciting time in the evolution of AI as the focus expands from building models with astounding new capabilities to understanding how we can harness the power of this transformational technology to revolutionize business. Towards this end, NetApp is introducing its NetApp AIPod™ with NVIDIA OVX – a validated reference architecture platform that combines the power of NVIDIA's advanced GPU and networking technologies with NetApp's leading high-performance storage and data management capabilities with the power of NVIDIA L40S GPUs and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, together with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand or NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking as well as NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs. The NVIDIA OVX platform streamlines adoption of AI applications for businesses. In order to take full advantage of the platform, enterprises must seamlessly integrate the technology into their existing infrastructure.

NetApp is expanding its leadership in storage and data management for AI by offering validated storage solutions for NVIDIA OVX systems. We are excited to partner with NVIDIA to take AI beyond the realm of dedicated large-scale training environments and into the realm of enterprise IT. A domain where AI applications need to be deployed quickly, securely, and reliably while coexisting with other critical business apps.

NVIDIA's OVX platform accelerates AI workload transitions, empowers organizations to deploy powerful general-purpose AI applications, and unlocks unprecedented possibilities for innovation and growth. When integrated in a full stack solution with NetApp storage and NVIDIA-Certified OVX servers, this new offering allows customers to accelerate AI adoption by leveraging fully validated reference architectures. Organizations can now explore new opportunities to unleash the potential of AI across the enterprise while eliminating complexity around the deployment and operation of AI enabled workloads. We're bringing in simplicity and efficiency, so you can focus on how AI can transform your business.

The future of enterprise AI solutions

NetApp AIPod with NVIDIA OVX platform paves the way for the adoption of enterprise AI solutions and showcases the benefits of collaboration between industry leaders like NetApp and NVIDIA. This groundbreaking solution seamlessly integrates NetApp all-flash storage with NVIDIA-Certified OVX servers - including NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, and NVIDIA accelerated networking - to offer a complete hardware and software solution.

The NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform includes:

• AI and machine learning frameworks: Pre-optimized versions of popular AI frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and others, which are designed to take full advantage of NVIDIA GPUs for accelerated computing tasks.
• NVIDIA NIM Inference Microservices: Featuring models optimized for deployment with software such as NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, NIM microservices allow developers to run high-performance production AI on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure.
• NVIDIA CUDA-X Microservices: A collection of microservices including NVIDIA NeMo Retriever for retrieval-augmented generation that enables modern computing applications to benefit from the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform.
• NVIDIA RAPIDS. A suite of open-source software libraries and APIs for executing end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines entirely on GPUs.
• Enterprise support. NVIDIA provides enterprise-grade support for the software platform, ensuring that businesses can deploy critical AI applications with confidence.

NetApp AIPod with NVIDIA OVX combines these tools with powerful storage technology to enable a wide range of general-purpose AI applications, including chatbots and sophisticated computer vision models. This platform addresses the challenges in mainstreaming AI for the enterprise by ensuring fast, secure, and efficient implementation across business environments.

Simplifying deployment and accelerating implementation

NetApp AIPod tackles the challenges of implementing AI systems, such as the complexities of integrating an AI software stack, the risks associated with patching numerous open-source packages for security purposes, and the need for reliable and high-performance AI platforms. This platform is designed to prioritize simplicity, efficiency, and scalability.

A unified solution for a fragmented landscape

The AI landscape is marked by many foundational large language models, libraries, third-party and open-source software packages, which can make integrating them a challenge. NetApp AIPod with NVIDIA-Certified OVX servers - combining NVIDIA accelerated computing, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, and high-speed NVIDIA networking - provides a platform to simplify and optimize AI infrastructure, including systems, data management, and applications.

NVIDIA-Certified OVX systems combined with NetApp validated storage solutions offer customers key benefits, including:

• Flexible reference architectures for NVIDIA-Certified OVX systems.
• NetApp validated storage solutions optimized for high-performance AI workloads.
• A range of validated storage options to meet enterprise data center needs and bring accelerated computing to where their data already resides.

Next steps

Looking ahead, we recognize that the evolution of AI relies on a foundation of integrated, intelligent, high-performance infrastructure that allows us to re-imagine how technology impacts our business and our lives without having to re-imagine how we manage IT. Stay tuned to hear more about how NetApp is partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to the enterprise and help you revolutionize your business.