Dell and NVIDIA Get You Ready for the Age of AI with Flexible Turnkey Solutions

Today, I’m very excited to announce that our joint reference architecture with Dell Isilon and the NVIDIA DGX-1 is now commercially available as an integrated turnkey AI solution sold exclusively through our joint strategic channel partners. Pairing Dell’s scale-out All-Flash Isilon F800 with the NVIDIA DGX-1 system, this solution addresses the challenges associated with scaling AI workloads in the data center, from design to deployment to support.

This new solution is designed to simplify and accelerate AI deployments with a jointly validated reference architecture offered as a converged solution, with single point-of-contact support through our network of strategic channel partners. This solution is initially available in the Americas via Computacenter US, Insight, Presidio, Sirius and WWT.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents the 4th revolutionary technology epoch and promises to improve humanity while at the same time delivering unparalleled financial success for those that can harness it.  The winners and losers in the Age of AI will be separated by organizations who recognize that data is now a capital asset (we call that Data Capital) and can quickly and efficiently harvest their data capital with analytics. AI represents the pinnacle of analytics and will allow organizations to extract the maximum value from their data to differentiate products, enhance services and open new revenue streams.

Gartner is predicting US$3.9 trillion1 in AI generated revenue by 2022. According to McKinsey2, by 2030, AI “could potentially deliver additional global economic activity of around US$13 trillion” with the early AI adopters standing to achieve up to 20-25 percent more of the economic benefits than the laggards. To put this into perspective, this means that by 2030, AI’s impact could be larger than today’s cumulative worldwide GDP.

The Age of AI is already here with 37 percent2 of companies already investing in AI and 85 percent2 of companies saying they plan to do so in the next three years. In anticipation of the deluge of new deep learning and machine learning use cases, Dell and NVIDIA have spent years collaborating through a joint OEM partnership, to offer multiple AI solutions exclusively through our channel partners that offer flexibility and informed choice. What started with graphics acceleration for Dell PCs and workstations quickly evolved into NVIDIA GPU-accelerated servers, like the ultra-dense Dell PowerEdge C4140, to speed up AI workloads. As these solutions matured and became more data intensive, our partnership evolved to production-grade platforms like the Dell Ready Solutions for AI. This Ready Solution pairs the Dell PowerEdge C4140 with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs with Dell Isilon’s high performance All-Flash scale-out storage and networking to eliminate I/O bottlenecks to fuel deeper AI insights at scale. The natural progression from here was to get out ahead of the rapidly changing AI analytics toolkits such as TensorFlow and Pytorch, which are constantly optimizing their analytics to take advantage of the parallelism of large multi-socket servers and multi-server configs. This led to the validation and launch of the reference architecture with Isilon All-Flash and the NVIDIA DGX server this past November.

These new turnkey AI platforms with Dell Isilon and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers will enable rapid deployment of production-grade deep learning solutions for use cases such as genomics, precision medicine, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD), video analytics and content enrichment, fraud detection/prevention and a multitude of other AI workloads. This scale-out offering independently scales compute and storage allowing customers the flexibility to optimize the balance among price, performance and data footprint. Additionally, the validated solution stacks will allow these strategic channel partners to offer value-added innovation to further accelerate end-user application development and vertical use case realization for deep learning and AI solutions.

It’s not just me who is thrilled about this. We have five best-in-class partners in The Americas with specialized expertise in architecting, deploying and supporting modern infrastructure for AI and data-intensive workloads, who are just as excited about this opportunity for their customers:

“At Computacenter, we deliver end-to-end platforms to our customers, so they can focus on use cases and applications. By combining NVIDIA’s DGX-1 high-density compute with Dell’s All-Flash Isilon storage, we are able to deliver a fully integrated and scalable end-to-end AI and deep learning platform. In addition, Isilon’s ability to consolidate data across AI and IT applications enables us to deploy AI solutions with a back-end data lake, streamlining overall data management for our customers.”

– Matt Fornito, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, Computacenter US

“Organizations have been amassing data for years, and in some cases, for decades. Data volumes continue to increase. But, garnering new insights from this data is harder to come by. Our clients are increasingly turning to deep learning and artificial intelligence technologies to accelerate their digital transformation and harness the wealth of their information. At Insight, we deliver end-to-end platforms that simplify data management challenges and ultimately deliver business value through AI-based solutions. By combining NVIDIA DGX and Dell Isilon, along with Insight’s data center transformation and digital innovation expertise, we help clients capitalize on the value of innovation at an unprecedented speed.”

– Juan Orlandini, Chief Architect, Insight, Cloud + Data Center Transformation division

Our customers have been demanding a simpler, faster way to scale AI infrastructure in support of business transformation fueled by data. We’re excited about the joint solution of Dell Isilon with NVIDIA DGX, which will help enterprises everywhere extend the reach of AI powered by the leaders in AI, GPU computing and high-performance storage, combined with our expertise, services and support.”

Vinu Thomas, Chief Technology Officer, Presidio

“Sirius works with top strategic partners such as Dell and NVIDIA to deliver integrated, high-performance solutions. Our dedicated Big Data and Analytics practice brings together deep expertise with the power of NVIDIA’s high-speed GPU DGX-1 and the robust storage architecture of Dell’s Isilon, resulting in a truly holistic, future-ready deep learning solution.”

– Chris Mierzwa, Chief Technology Officer, Sirius

These best-in-class partners share our excitement because they understand the needs of their customers and they see clear demand for high performance AI solutions and deep learning platforms.

Together, these technologies provide the foundation for successful AI solutions which drive the development of advanced deep learning software frameworks, deliver massively parallel compute in the form of NVIDIA GPUs for parallel model training, and scale-out All-Flash file systems to support the concurrency, performance and petabyte scale of unstructured image and video data sets. This puts customers in the driver’s seat to leverage AI to get differentiated insights out of their data using the most optimal solution for their workload.

As we continue to innovate and make AI simpler to consume, I look forward to future announcements regarding the extended worldwide availability of our joint Dell-NVIDIA turnkey solution.

Learn more about the Dell Isilon with NVIDIA DGX-1 solution by visiting www.dellemc.com/ai-with-isilon

  1. Gartner press release: April 2018
  2. McKinsey Global Institute. Notes from the AI Frontier: Modeling the Impact of AI on the World Economy
Travis Vigil

About the Author: Travis Vigil

Travis Vigil is Senior Vice President leading Portfolio and Product Management for Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG). He and his team are responsible for Dell’s Server, Storage, Data Protection, CI/HCI, Networking and Solutions businesses. He has over 20 years of Product Management, Marketing and Business Operations experience with technology companies including Intel and Dell. In previous roles at Dell, he served as Senior Vice President for Storage and Data Protection Product Management, and Senior Vice President for Business Operations focused on Dell’s Server, Storage and Networking Businesses. He has a B.S. from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.