Accelerate Your Journey to AI with NetApp and NVIDIA

Visionaries in virtually all industries are looking for ways to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to enable new customer touchpoints, reinvent the customer experience, drive business value—and even change the world. Of the many AI use cases in development, here are a few we’re focused on:

Digital health. The intersection of data from wearable devices, mobile connectivity, and AI is ushering in an era where healthcare is more personalized, more efficient, and less expensive.
Automotive. Although autonomous driving gets all the attention, automotive companies also plan to use data from connected cars to improve design, safety, and efficiency.
Consumer electronics. Leading companies aren’t just adding AI to existing products, they’re looking to change the way they innovate and they’re focusing on integration and collaboration.

Unfortunately, many organizations still underestimate how much AI depends on an ability to marshal and manage vast quantities of data. To help put your deep learning projects on a path to achieve real business impact, NetApp is today announcing NetApp ONTAP AI proven architecture. Powered by NVIDIA DGX supercomputers and NetApp all-flash storage, ONTAP AI lets you simplify, accelerate, and scale the data pipeline needed for AI to gain deeper understanding in less time.

For example, adding a few sensors to an asthma inhaler opens a huge opportunity to correlate usage and location information among patients. In the United States alone there are 25 million asthma sufferers—that’s 1 in every 13 people. Combining patient data with information on weather, air quality, pollen counts, and so on in real time can help patients avoid potential triggers, thereby minimizing risk and improving overall health. Cambridge Consultants, a NetApp customer and AI partner, is exploring the potential of smart inhalers using the same NVIDIA and NetApp technologies in ONTAP AI.

The smart inhaler example is a good model for thinking about the requirements of AI at scale. Data flows from thousands of devices at the edge. That data is combined with outside data sets during training in a core on-premises data center with GPU acceleration. The resulting inference model is deployed in the cloud to analyze new data points and identify and act on trigger events.

A bottleneck at any point idles expensive infrastructure, increases costs, and data scientists waste valuable time troubleshooting infrastructure and waiting for results. That alone is bad enough, but in the smart inhaler example and many other use cases, bottlenecks also put outcomes at risk: it does a patient little good to find out about a trigger event after they’ve had an attack.

ONTAP AI is designed to address AI bottlenecks wherever they occur. NVIDIA and NetApp technologies eliminate performance issues and enable secure, non-disruptive data access, delivering AI performance at scale. The NetApp Data Fabric enables you to integrate diverse, dynamic, and distributed data sources with complete control and protection.

With ONTAP AI you can:

Build an integrated data pipeline from edge to core to cloud, enabling data-driven decisions for better business outcomes
Simplify deployment of AI infrastructure to speed innovation with a pre-validated and tested architecture
Deliver the performance and scalability your business needs for the most demanding AI and deep-learning applications

Only the proven architecture of ONTAP AI, fueled by a data pipeline from edge to core to cloud, delivers an integrated, simple, and high-performance solution to capitalize on the full promise of AI. I’ve talked with a number of joint NetApp and NVIDIA partners and they’re excited to bring ONTAP AI to customers.

If you’ve been delaying AI projects because the barriers to entry were too high, the time is now. With ONTAP AI you can start small, deploy fast, and scale easily as projects move from pilot to production. NetApp, NVIDIA, and a dedicated team of resellers and integrators are here to help, including: Groupware Technology, ePlus, World Wide Technology (WWT), Integrated Archive Systems (IAS), Enterprise Vision Technologies (EVT), Trace3, and Scan Computers UK.

Source: blog.netapp