>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. My name is David Lantz. I'm here with my co host John Troia. This is Day three of V M World 2019 2 sets. >> This is >> our 10th year at the M. World Cube is the leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Marry on Blondie is here. He's the C m o and chief evangelist that 10 tree by DDN Yes, sir. He's joined by Graham Breezes The Field CTO at 10 Tree also by DDN Recent acquisition jets Great to see you. >> Likewise, as they say, we're back. I like I like to call it a hibernation in the sense that people may have not known where did Ian or 10 Trias and Tension by Dede and, as the name implies, were acquired a year ago at the M World August 31st of 2018. And in the year since, we've been ableto invest in engineering support, my joining the company in marketing to take this solution, we've been able to save thousands of customers millions of man hours and bring it to a larger number of users. Way >> first saw 10 tree, we said, Wow, this is all about simplification. And Jonah Course you remember that when you go back to the early early Dick Cube days of of'em World, very complex storage was a major challenge. 10 Tree was all about simplifying that. Of course, we know DDN as well is the high performance specialist and have worked with those guys for a number of years. But take >> us >> back Married to the original vision of 10 Cherie. Is that original vision still alive? How was it evolved? >> Well, I'd say that it's, ah, number one reason why we're a part of the DD and family of brands because, as, ah, portfolio company, they're looking good. Bring technologies. I'm the marketing guy for our enterprise or virtual ization audience, and the product sets that cover high performance computing have their own audience. So for me, I'm focused on that. Graham's also focused on that, and, uh, really what continues to make us different today is the fact we were designed to learn from the beginning to understand how virtual machines end to end work with infrastructure. And that's really the foundation of what makes us different today. The same thing, right? >> So from the very beginning we were we were built to understand the work clothes that we service in the data center. So and that was virtual machines. We service those on multiple hyper visors today in terms of being able to understand those workloads intrinsically gives us a tremendous capability. Thio place. I owe again understanding that the infrastructure network storage, hyper visor, uh, weaken view that end end in terms of a latent a graph and give customers and insight into the infrastructure how it's performing. I would say that we're actually extending that further ways in terms of additional workload that we're gonna be able to take on later this year. >> So I know a lot >> of storage admits, although I I only play one on >> TV, but, uh, no, consistently >> throughout the years, right? 10 tree user experiences that is the forefront there. And in fact, they they often some people have said, You know what? I really want to get something done. I grab my tent Reeboks and so it can't talk. Maybe some examples of one example of why the user experience how the user experiences differ or why, why it's different. >> I'll start off by saying that I had a chance being new to the company just two weeks to meet a lot of 10 tree users. And prior to taking the job, I talkto us some folks behind the scenes, and they all told me the same thing. But what I was so interested to hear is that if they didn't have 10 tree, they'd otherwise not have the time to do the automation work, the research work, the strategy work or even the firefighting that's vital to their everyday operations. Right? So it's like, of course, I don't need to manage it. If I did, I wouldn't be able to do all these other things. And I think that's it. Rings true right that it's hard to quantify that time savings because people say, 0 1/2 of it. See, that's really not much of the greater scheme of things. I don't know. 1/2 50. Working on strategic program is a huge opportunity. Let's see >> the value of 10 tree to our end users and we've heard from a lot of them this week actually spent a fantastic event hearing from many of our passionate consumers. From the very beginning. We wanted to build a product that ultimately customers care about, and we've seen that this week in droves. But I would say the going back to what they get out of it. It's the values and what they don't have to do, so they don't have to carve up ones. They don't have to carve up volumes. All they have to do is work with the units of infrastructure that air native to their environment, v ems. They deal with everything in their environment from our virtual machine perspective, virtual machines, one thing across the infrastructure. Again, they can add those virtual machines seamlessly. They can add those in seconds they don't have toe size and add anything in terms of how am I gonna divide up the storage coming in a provisional I Oh, how am I going to get the technical pieces right? Uh, they basically just get place v EMS, and we have a very simplistic way to give them Ah, visualization into that because we understand that virtual machine and what it takes to service. It comes right back to them in terms of time savings that are tremendous in terms of that. >> So let's deal with the elephant in the room. So, so 10 tree. We've talked about all the great stuff in the original founding vision. But then I ran into some troubles, right? And so what? How do you deal with that with customers in terms of just their perception of what what occurred you guys did the eye poets, et cetera, take us through how you're making sure customers are cool with you guys. >> I'm naturally, glass is half full kind of guy from previous, uh, times on the Cube. The interesting thing is, not a lot of people actually knew. Maybe we didn't create enough brand recognition in the past for people to even know that there was a transition. There were even some of our customers. And Graham, you can pile on this that because they don't manage the product every day because they don't have to. It's kind of so easy they even for gotten a lot about it on don't spend a lot of time. I'd say that the reason why we are able to continue. Invest today a year after the acquisition is because retaining existing customers was something that was very successful, and to a lot of them, you can add comments. It wasn't easy to switch to something. They could just switch to something else because there's no other product, does these automatic things and provides the predictive modeling that they're used to. So it's like what we switched to so they just kept going, and to them, they've given us a lot of great feedback. Being owned by the largest private storage company on planet Earth has the advantages of strong source of supply. Great Leverett reverse logistics partnerships with suppliers as a bigger company to be able to service them. Long >> trial wasn't broke, so you didn't need to fix it. And you were ableto maintain obviously a large portion of that customer base. And what was this service experience like? And how is that evolving? And what is Dede and bring to the table? >> So, uh, boy DD and brings so many resources in terms of bringing this from the point when they bought us last year. A year ago today, I think we transition with about 40 people in the company. We're up about 200 now, so Ah, serious investment. Obviously, that's ah have been a pretty heavy job in terms of building that thing back up. Uh, service and support we've put all of the resource is the stated goal coming across the acquisition was they have, ah, 10. Tree support tender by DNC would be better than where 10 tree support was. We fought them on >> rate scores, too. So it's hard to go from there. Right? And >> I would say what we've been doing on that today. I mean, in terms of the S L. A's, I think those were as good as they've ever been from that perspective. So we have a big team behind us that are working really hard to make sure that the customer experience is exactly what we want. A 10 tree experience to be >> So big messages at this This show, of course, multi cloud kubernetes solving climate change, fixing the homeless problem in San Francisco. I'm not hearing that from you guys. What's what's your key message to the VM world? >> Well, I personally believe that there's a lot of opportunity to invest in improving operations that are already pretty darn stable, operating these environments, talking to folks here on the floor. These new technologies you're talking about are certainly gonna change the way we deploy things. But there's gonna be a lot of time left Still operating virtualized server infrastructure and accelerating VD I deployments to just operationalized things better. We're hoping that folks choose some new technologies out there. I mean, there's a bill was a lot of hype in past years. About what technology to choose. We're all flash infrastructure, but well, I'd liketo for the say were intelligent infrastructure. We have 10 and 40 get boards were all flash, but that's not what you choose this. You choose this because you're able to take their operations and spend more your time on the apse because you're not messing around with that low level infrastructure. I think that there's a renaissance of, of, of investment and opportunity to innovate in that space into Graham's point about going further up the stack. We now have data database technology that we can show gives database administrators the direct ability to self service their own cloning, their own, staging their own operations, which otherwise would be a complex set of trouble tickets internally to provision the environment. Everyone loves to self service. That's really big. I think our customers love. It's a self service aspect. I see the self service and >> the ability to d'oh again, not have to worry about all the things that they don't have to do in terms of again not having to get into those details. A cz Morrow mentioned in terms of the database side, that's, ah, workload, the workload intelligence that we've already had for virtual machines. We can now service that database object natively. We're going to do sequel server later this year, uh, being ableto again, being able to see where whether or not they've got a host or a network or a storage problem being able to see where those the that unit they're serving, having that inside is tremendously powerful. Also being able the snapshot to be able to clone to be able thio manage and protect that database in a native way. Not having to worry about, you know, going into a console, worrying about the underlying every structure, the ones, the volumes, all the pieces that might people people would have to get involved with maybe moving from, like, production to test and those kinds of things. So it's the simplicity, eyes all the things that you really don't have to do across the getting down in terms of one's the volumes, the sizing exercises one of our customers put it. Best thing. You know, I hear a lot of things back from different customer. If he says the country, the sentry box is the best employee has >> I see that way? Reinvest, Reinvest. I haven't heard a customer yet that talks about reducing staff. Their I t staff is really, really critical. They want to invest up Kai throw buzzword out there, Dev. Ops. You didn't mention that it's all about Dev ops, right? And one thing that's interesting here is were or ah, technology that supports virtual environments and how many software developers use virtual environments to write, test and and basically developed programmes lots and being able to give those developers the ability to create new machines and be very agile in the way they do. Their test of is awesome and in terms of just taking big amounts of data from a nap, if I can circling APP, which is these virtual machines be ableto look at that on the infrastructure and more of her copy data so that I can do stuff with that data. All in the flying virtualization we think of Dev Ops is being very much a cloud thing. I'd say that virtual ization specifically server virtualization is the perfect foundation for Dav ops like functionality. And what we've been able to do is provide that user experience directly to those folks up the stacks of the infrastructure. Guy doesn't have to touch it. I wanted to pull >> a couple of threads together, and I think because we talked about the original vision kind of E m r centric, VM centric multiple hyper visors now multi cloud here in the world. So what >> are you seeing >> in the customers? Is that is it? Is it a multi cloud portfolio? What? What are you seeing your customers going to in the future with both on premise hybrid cloud public. So where does where does 10 tree fit into the storage portfolio? >> And they kind of >> fit all over the map. I think in terms of the most of the customers that we have ultimately have infrastructure on site and in their own control. We do have some that ultimately put those out in places that are quote unquote clouds, if you will, but they're not in the service. Vendor clouds actually have a couple folks, actually, that our cloud providers. So they're building their own clouds to service customers using market. What >> differentiates service is for serving better d our offerings because they can offer something that's very end end for that customer. And so there's more. They monetize it. Yeah, and I think those type of customers, like the more regional provider or more of a specialty service provider rather than the roll your own stuff, I'd say that Generally speaking, folks want tohave a level of abstraction as they go into new architecture's so multi cloud from a past life I wrote a lot about. This is this idea that I don't have to worry about which cloud I'm on to do what I'm doing. I want to be able to do it and then regards of which clouded on it just works. And so I think that our philosophy is how we can continue to move up the stack and provide not US access to our analytics because all that analytic stuff we do in machine learning is available via a P I We have ah v r o plug in and all that sort of stuff to be able allow that to happen. But when we're talking now about APS and how those APS work across multiple, you know, pieces of infrastructure, multiple V EMS, we can now develop build a composite view of what those analytics mean in a way that really now gives them new inside test. So how can I move it over here? Can I move over here? What's gonna happen if I move it over here over there? And I think that's the part that should at least delineate from your average garden variety infrastructure and what we like to call intelligent infrastructure stopping that can, Actually that's doing stuff to be able to give you that data because there's always a way you could do with the long way. Just nobody has time to do with the long way, huh? No. And I would actually say that you >> know what you just touched on, uh, going back to a fundamental 10 tree. Different churches, getting that level of abstraction, right is absolutely the key to what we do. We understand that workload. That virtual machine is the level of abstraction. It's the unit infrastructure within a virtual environment in terms of somebody who's running databases. Databases are the unit of infrastructure that they want to manage. So we line exactly to the fundamental building blocks that they're doing in those containers, certainly moving forward. It's certainly another piece we're looking. We've actually, uh I think for about three years now, we've been looking pretty hard of containers. We've been waiting to see where customers were at. Obviously Of'em were put. Put some things on the map this week in terms of that they were pretty excited about in terms of looking in terms of how we would support. >> Well, it certainly makes it more interesting if you're gonna lean into it with someone like Vienna where behind it. I mean, I still think there are some questions, but I actually like the strategy of because if I understand it correctly of Visa, the sphere admin is going to see the spear. But ah ah, developers going to see kubernetes. So >> yeah, that's kind of cool. And we just want to give people an experience, allows them to self service under the control of the I T department so that they can spend less time on infrastructure. Just the end of the I haven't met a developer that even likes infrastructure. They love to not have to deal with it at all. They only do it out. It assessed even database folks They love infrastructural because they had to think about it. They wanted to avoid the pitfalls of bad infrastructure infrastructures Code is yeah, way we believe in that >> question. Go to market. Uh, you preserve the 10 tree name so that says a lot. What's to go to market like? How are you guys structuring the >> organizational in terms of, ah, parent company perspective or a wholly owned subsidiary of DDN? So 10 tree by DDN our go to market model is channel centric in the sense that still a vast majority of people who procure I t infrastructure prefer to use an integrator or reseller some sort of thing. As far as that goes, what you'll see from us, probably more than you did historically, is more work with some of the folks in the ecosystem. Let's say in the data protection space, we see a rubric as an example, and I think you can talk to some of that scene where historically 10 Tree hadn't really done. It's much collaboration there, but I think now, given the overall stability of the segment and people knowing exactly where value could be added, we have a really cool joint story and you're talking about because your team does that. >> Yeah, so I would certainly say, you know, in terms of go to market Side, we've been very much channel lead. Actually, it's been very interesting to go through this with the channel folks. It's a There's also a couple other pieces I mentioned you mentioned some of the cloud provider. Some of those certainly crossed lines between whether they're MSP is whether they are resellers, especially as we go to our friends across the pond. Maybe that's the VM it'll Barcelona discussion, but some of those were all three, right? So there are customer their service providers there. Ah ah, channel partner if you want terms of a resellers. So, um, it's been pretty interesting from that perspective. I think the thing is a lot of opportunity interview that Certainly, uh, I would say where we're at in terms of, we're trying to very much. Uh, we understand customers have ecosystems. I mean, Marco Mitchem, the backup spaces, right? Uh, customers. We're doing new and different things in there, and they want us to fit into those pieces. Ah, and I'd certainly say in the world that we're in, we're not tryingto go solve and boil the ocean in terms of all the problems ourselves we're trying to figure out are the things that we can bring to the table that make it easier for them to integrate with us And maybe in some new and novel, right, >> So question So what's the number one customer problem that when you guys hear you say, that's our wheelhouse, we're gonna crush the competition. >> I'll let you go first, >> So I'd say, you know, if they have a virtualized environment, I mean, we belong there. Vermin. Actually, somebody said this bed is the best Earlier again. Today in the booze is like, you know, the person who doesn't have entries, a person who doesn't know about 10 tree. If they have a virtual environment, you know, the, uh I would say that this week's been pretty interesting. Lots of customer meetings. So it's been pretty, pretty awesome, getting a lot of things back. But I would say the things that they're asking us to solve our not impossible things. They're looking for evolution's. They're looking for things in terms of better insights in their environment, maybe deeper insights. One of the things we're looking to do with the tremendous amount of data we've got coming back, Um, got almost a million machines coming back to us in terms of auto support data every single night. About 2.3 trillion data points for the last three years, eh? So we're looking to make that data that we've gotten into meaningful consumable information for them. That's actionable. So again, again, what can we see in a virtual environment, not just 10 tree things in terms of storage of those kinds of things, but maybe what patches they have installed that might be affecting a network driver, which might affect the certain configuration and being able to expose and and give them some actionable ways to go take care of those problems. >> All right, we gotta go marry. I'll give you. The last word >> stated simply if you are using virtual, is a Shinto abstract infrastructure. As a wayto accelerate your operations, I run the M where, if you have ah 100 virtual machine, 150 virtual machines, you could really benefit from maybe choosing a different way to do that. Do infrastructure. I can't say the competition doesn't work. Of course, the products work. We just want hope wanted hope that folks could see that doing it differently may produce a different outcome. And different outcomes could be good. >> All right, Mario Graham, Thanks very much for coming to the cubes. Great. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you for watching John Troy a day Volante. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now I'm joined by Dave Volante who's an analyst with wiki bond a colleague here at wiki bond and co-ceo of Silicon angle Dave welcome to the cube Dave a lot of conversation about AI what is it about today that is making AI so important to so many businesses well I think there's three things Peter the first is the data we've been on this you know decade-long Hadoop bandwagon and what that did is it really focused organizations on putting data at the center of their business and now they're trying to figure out okay how do we get more value out of that so the second piece of that is the technology is now becoming available so you know AI of course has been around forever but the the the infrastructure to support that the GPUs the processing power flash storage you know deep learning frameworks like tensorflow really cafe have started to come to the market place so the technology is now available to act on that data and I think the third is people are trying to get digital right every this is about digital transformation digital means data we talk about that all the time in every corner office is trying to figure out what their digital strategy should be so there's trying to remain competitive and they see automation and artificial intelligence machine intelligence applied to that data as a linchpin of their competitiveness so a lot of people talk about the notion of data as a source of value and there's been some presumption that's all going to the cloud is that accurate it's funny you say that because as you know we've done a lot of work on this and I think the thing that organizations have realized in the last 10 years is the idea of bringing 5 megabytes of compute to a petabyte of data is far more viable and and as a result the pendulum is really swinging in many different directions one being the edge data is going to stay there certainly the cloud is a major force and most of the data still today lives on premises and that's where most of the data is likely going to stay and so know all the data is not going to go into the cloud where he's not the central cloud that's right the the central public cloud you know you can maybe redefine the boundaries of the cloud I think the key is you want to bring that cloud like experience to the data we've talked about that a lot in the wiki bond and cube communities and that's all about the simplification and go to cloud business models so that suggests pretty strongly that there is going to continue to be a relationship between choices about hardware infrastructure on premises and the success at making some of these advanced complex workloads run and scream and really drive some of that innovative business capabilities as you think about that what is it about AI technologies or AI algorithms and applications that have an impact on storage decisions well I mean the workloads the characteristics of the workloads are going to be oftentimes it's going to be largely unstructured data there's going to be a small files there's gonna be a lot of those small files and they're gonna be kind of randomly distributed and as a result that's gonna change the way in which people are gonna design systems to accommodate those workloads there's gonna be a lot more bandwidth there's gonna be a lot more parallelism in those systems in order to accommodate and keep those CPUs busy you know we're going to talk more about that but the the workload characteristics are changing so the fundamental infrastructure has to change as well so our goal ultimately is to ensure that we can keep these new high-performing GPUs saturated by flowing data to them without a lot of spiky performance throughout the entire subsystem they've got that right yeah I think that's right and that's when I was talking about parallelism that's what you want to do you want to be able to load up that processor especially these alternative processors like GPUs and make sure that they stay busy you know the other thing is when there's a problem you don't want to have to restart the job so you want to have sort of real-time error recovery if you will I mean that's been crucial in the high-performance world for a long long time in terms of you know because these jobs as you know take a long long time so to the extent that you don't have to restart a job from your Ground Zero you can save a lot of money yeah especially as we as you said as we start to integrate some of these AI applications with some of the operational applications that are actually recording the results of of the work that's being performed or the prediction that's being made or the recommendation that's being proffered so I think ultimately if we start thinking about this crucial role that AI workloads are gonna have in business and that storage is gonna have on AI move more processing close to the data et cetera that suggests that there's gonna be some changes in the offing for the storage industry what are your thinking about how the storage industry is going to evolve over time well there's certainly a lot of hardware stuff that's going on we always talk about Software Defined but there's some Hardware still matters right so if obviously flash storage changed the game from a spinning mechanical disc and that's that's part of this you're also as I said before seeing a lot more parallelism high bandwidth is critical you know a lot of the discussion that we're having in our community is the affinity between HPC high-performance computing and big data and I think that was pretty clear and now that's evolving to AI so the internal network things like InfiniBand are pretty important nvme is coming on to the scene so those are some of the things that that we see I think the other one is file systems you know NFS tends to deal really well with unstructured data and data that is you know sequential when you have all this streaming exactly and when you have all this what we just described this sort of random nature nature and you have the the need for parallelism you really need to rethink file systems you know file systems are again a linchpin of getting the most out of these AI workloads and I think the other is we talked about the cloud model you got to make this stuff simple if we're gonna bring AI and machine intelligence workloads to the enterprise it's got to be manageable by Enterprise admins you know you don't you don't need you know you not going to be able to have a scientist be able to deploy this stuff so it's got to be simpler a cloud like fantastic Dave want a wiki bond thanks very much for being on the cube my pleasure

(uptempo orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon theCUBE special feature. A special digital community event on the relationship between AI, infrastructure and business value. Now it's sponsored by DDN with participation from NIVIDA, and over the course of the next hour, we're going to reveal something about this special and evolving relationship between sometimes tried and true storage technologies and the emerging potential of AI as we try to achieve these new business outcomes. So to do that we're going to start off with a series of conversations with some thought leaders from DDN and from NVIDIA and at the end, we're going to go into a crowd chat and this is going to be your opportunity to engage these experts directly. Ask your questions, share your stories, find out what your peers are thinking and how they're achieving their AI objectives. That's at the very end but to start, let's begin the conversation with Kurt Kuckein who is a senior director of marketing at DDN. >> Thanks Peter, happy to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about DNN at the start. >> So DDN is a storage company that's been around for 20 years. We've got a legacy in high performance computing, and that's what we see a lot of similarities with this new AI workload. DDN is well known in that HPC community. If you look at the top 100 super computers in the world, we're attached to 75% of them. And so we have the fundamental understanding of that type of scalable need, that's where we're focused. We're focused on performance requirements. We're focused on scalability requirements which can mean multiple things. It can mean the scaling of performance. It can mean the scaling of capacity, and we're very flexible. >> Well let me stop you and say, so you've got a lot of customers in the high performance world. And a lot of those customers are at the vanguard of moving to some of these new AI workloads. What are customer's saying? With this significant engagement that you have with the best and the brightest out there. What are they saying about this transition to AI? >> Well I think it's fascinating that we have a bifurcated customer base here where we have those traditionalist who probably have been looking at AI for over 40 years, and they've been exploring this idea and they've gone to the peaks and troughs in the promise of AI, and then contraction because CPUs weren't powerful enough. Now we've got this emergence of GPS in the super computing world. And if you look at how the super computing world has expanded in the last few years. It is through investment in GPUs. And then we've got an entirely different segment which is a much more commercial segment, and they may be newly invested in this AI arena. They don't have the legacy of 30, 40 years of research behind them, and they are trying to figure out exactly what do I do here. A lot of companies are coming to us. Hey, I have an AI initiative. Well, what's behind it? We don't know yet but we've got to have something, and they don't you understand where is this infrastructure going to come from. >> So a general availability of AI technologies and obviously flash has been a big part of that. Very high speed networks within data centers. Virtualization certainly helps as well. Now opens up the possibility for using these algorithms, some of which have been around for a long time that require very specialized bespoke configurations of hardware to the enterprise. That still begs the question. There are some differences between high performance computing workloads and AI workloads. Let's start with some of the, what are the similarities and let's explore some of the differences. >> So the biggest similarity I think is it's an intractable hard IO problem. At least from the storage perspective, it requires a lot of high throughput. Depending on where those idle characteristics are from. It can be a very small file, high opt intensive type workflows but it needs the ability of the entire infrastructure to deliver all of that seamlessly from end to end. >> So really high performance throughput so that you can get to the data you need and keep this computing element saturated. >> Keeping the GPU saturated is really the key. That's where the huge investment is. >> So how do AI and HPC workloads differ? >> So how they are fundamentally different is often AI workloads operate on a smaller scale in terms of the amount of capacity, at least today's AI workloads, right? As soon as a project encounter success, what our forecast is is those things will take off and you'll want to apply those algorithm games bigger and bigger data sets. But today, we encounter things like 10 terabyte data sets, 50 terabyte data sets, and a lot of customers are focused only on that but what happens when you're successful? How you scale your current infrastructure to petabytes and multi petabytes when you'll need it in the future. >> So when I think of HPC, I think of often very, very big batch jobs. Very, very large complex datasets. When I think about AI, like image processing or voice processing whatever else it might be. Like for a lot of small files randomly access that require nonetheless some very complex processing that you don't want to have to restart all the time and the degree of some pushing that's required to make sure that you have the people that can do. Have I got that right? >> You've got that right. Now one, I think misconception is on the HPC side, that whole random small file thing has come in in the last five, 10 years, and it's something DDN have been working on quite a bit. Our legacy was in high performance throughput workloads but the workloads have evolved so much on the HPC side as well, and as you posited at the beginning so much of it has become AI and deep learning research. >> Right, so they look a lot more alike. >> They do look a lot more alike. >> So if we think about the revolving relationship now between some of these new data first workloads, AI oriented change the way the business operates type of stuff. What do you anticipate is going to be the future of the relationship between AI and storage? >> Well, what we foresee really is that the explosion in AI needs and AI capability is going to mimic what we already see, and really drive what we see on the storage side. We've been showing that graph for years and years of just everything going up into the right but as AI starts working on itself and improving itself, as the collection means keep getting better and more sophisticated, and have increased resolutions whether you're talking about cameras or in life sciences, acquisition. Capabilities just keep getting better and better and the resolutions get better and better. It's more and more data right and you want to be able to expose a wide variety of data to these algorithms. That's how they're going to learn faster. And so what we see is that the data centric part of the infrastructure is going to need the scale even if you're starting today with a small workload. >> Kurt, thank you very much, great conversation. How did this turn into value for users? Well let's take a look at some use cases that come out of these technologies. >> DDN A3I within video DGX-1 is a fully integrated and optimized technology solution that provides an enable into acceleration for a wide variety of AI and the use cases in any scale. The platform provides tremendous flexibility and supports a wide variety of workflows and data types. Already today, customers in the industry, academia and government all around the globe are leveraging DDN A3I within video DGX-1 for their AI and DL efforts. In this first example used case, DDN A3I enables the life sciences research laboratory to accelerate through microscopic capture and analysis pipeline. On the top half of the slide is the legacy pipeline which displays low resolution results from a microscope with a three minute delay. On the bottom half of the slide is the accelerated pipeline where DDN A3I within the video DGX-1 delivers results in real time. 200 times faster and with much higher resolution than the legacy pipeline. This used case demonstrates how a single unit deployment of the solution can enable researchers to achieve better science and the fastest times to results without the need to build out complex IT infrastructure. The white paper for this example used case is available on the DDN website. In the second example used case, DDN A3I with NVIDIA DGX-1 enables an autonomous vehicle development program. The process begins in the field where an experimental vehicle generates a wide range of telemetry that's captured on a mobile deployment of the solution. The vehicle data is used to train capabilities locally in the field which are transmitted to the experimental vehicle. Vehicle data from the fleet is captured to a central location where a large DDN A3I within video DGX-1 solution is used to train more advanced capabilities, which are transferred back to experimental vehicles in the field. The central facility also uses the large data sets in the repository to train experimental vehicles and simulate environments to further advance the AV program. This used case demonstrates the scalability, flexibility and edge to data center capability of the solution. DDN A3I within video DGX-1 brings together industry leading compute, storage and network technologies, in a fully integrated and optimized package that makes it easy for customers in all industries around the world to pursue break from business innovation using AI and DL. >> Ultimately, this industry is driven by what users must do, the outcomes if you try to seek. But it's always is made easier and faster when you got great partnerships working on some of these hard technologies together. Let's hear how DDN and NVIDIA are working together to try to deliver new classes of technology capable of making these AI workloads scream. Specifically, we've got Kurt Kuckein coming back. He's a senior director of marketing for DDN and Darrin Johnson who is global director of technical marketing for NVIDIA in the enterprise and deep learning. Today, we're going to be talking about what infrastructure can do to accelerate AI. And specifically we're going to use a relationship. A virgin relationship between DDN and NVIDIA to describe what we can do to accelerate AI workloads by using higher performance, smarter and more focused infrastructure for computing. Now to have this conversation, we've got two great guest here. We've got Kurt Kuckein, who is the senior director of marketing at DDN. And also Darrin Johnson, who's the global director of technical marketing for enterprise at NVIDIA. Kurt, Darrin, welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> So let's get going on this 'cause this is a very, very important topic, and I think it all starts with this notion of that there is a relationship that you guys put forward. Kurt, why don't you describe. >> Sure, well so what we're announcing today is DDNs, A3I architecture powered by NVIDIA. So it is a full rack level solution, a reference architecture that's been fully integrated and fully tested to deliver an AI infrastructure very simply, very completely. >> So if we think about why this is important. AI workloads clearly put special stress on underline technology. Darrin talk to us a little bit about the nature of these workloads and why in particular things like GPUs, and other technologies are so important to make them go fast? >> Absolutely, and as you probably know AI is all about the data. Whether you're doing medical imaging, whether you're doing natural language processing. Whatever it is, it's all driven by the data. The more data that you have, the better results that you get but to drive that data into the GPUs, you need greater IO and that's why we're here today to talk about DDN and the partnership of how to bring that IO to the GPUs on our DGX platforms. >> So if we think about what you describe. A lot of small files often randomly distributed with nonetheless very high profile jobs that just can't stop midstream and start over. >> Absolutely and if you think about the history of high performance computing which is very similar to AI, really IO is just that. Lots of files. You have to get it there. Low latency, high throughput and that's why DDNs probably, nearly 20 years of experience working in that exact same domain is perfect because you get the parallel file system which gives you that throughput, gives you that low latency. Just helps drive the GPU. >> So you mentioned HPC from 20 years of experience. Now it use to be that HPC, you'd have a scientist with a bunch of graduate students setting up some of these big, honking machine. but now we're moving with commercial domain You don't have graduate students running around. You have very low cost, high quality people. A lot of administrators, nonetheless quick people but a lot to learn. So how does this relationship actually start making or bringing AI within reach of the commercial world? Kurt, why you don't you-- >> Yeah, that's exactly where this reference architecture comes in. So a customer doesn't need to start from scratch. They have a design now that allows them to quickly implement AI. It's something that's really easily deployable. We fully integrated the solution. DDN has made changes to our parallel file system appliance to integrate directly with the DGX-1 environment. Makes the even easier to deploy from there, and extract the maximum performance out of this without having to run around and tuning a bunch of knobs, change a bunch of settings. It's really going to work out of the box. >> And NVIDIA has done more than the DGX-1. It's more than hardware. You've don't a lot of optimization of different AI toolkits et cetera so talk a little bit about that Darrin. >> Talking about the example that used researchers in the past with HPC. What we have today are data scientists. A scientist understand pie charts, they understand TensorFlow, they understand the frameworks. They don't want to understand the underlying file system, networking, RDM, a InfiniBand any of that. They just want to be able to come in, run their TensorFlow, get the data, get the results, and just keep turning that whether it's a single GPU or 90 DGXs or as many DGXs as you want. So this solution helps bring that to customers much easier so those data scientist don't have to be system administrators. >> So roughly it's the architecture that makes things easier but it's more than just for some of these commercial things. It's also the overall ecosystem. New application fires up, application developers. How is this going to impact the aggregate ecosystem is growing up around the need to do AI related outcomes? >> Well, I think one point that Darrin was getting to there in one of the bigg effects is also as these ecosystems reach a point where they're going to need to scale. There's somewhere where DDN has tons of experience. So many customers are starting off with smaller datasets. They still need the performance, a parallel file system in that case is going to deliver that performance. But then also as they grow, going from one GBU to 90 GXs is going to be an incredible amount of both performance scalability that they're going to need from their IO as well as probably capacity, scalability. And that's another thing that we've made easy with A3I is being able to scale that environment seamlessly within a single name space, so that people don't have to deal with a lot of again tuning and turning of knobs to make this stuff work really well and drive those outcomes that they need as they're successful. In the end, it is the application that's most important to both of us, right? It's not the infrastructure. It's making the discoveries faster. It's processing information out in the field faster. It's doing analysis of the MRI faster. Helping the doctors, helping anybody who is using this to really make faster decisions better decisions. >> Exactly. >> And just to add to that. In automotive industry, you have datasets that are 50 to 500 petabytes, and you need access to all that data, all the time because you're constantly training and retraining to create better models to create better autonomous vehicles, and you need the performance to do that. DDN helps bring that to bear, and with this reference architecture is simplifies it so you get the value add of NVIDIA GPUs plus its ecosystem software plus DDN. It's match made in heaven. >> Kurt, Darrin, thank you very much. Great conversation. To learn more about what they're talking about, let's take a look at a video created by DDN to explain the product and the offering. >> DDN A3I within video NVIDIA DGX-1 is a fully integrated and optimized technology solution that enables and accelerates end to end data pipelines for AI and DL workloads of any scale. It is designed to provide extreme amounts of performance and capacity backed by a jointly engineered and validated architecture. Compute is the first component of the solution. The DGX-1 delivers over one petaflop of DL training performance leveraging eight NVIDIA tester V100 GPUs in a 3RU appliance. The GPUs are configured in a hybrid cube mesh topology using the NVIDIA and VLink interconnect. DGX-1 delivers linearly predictable application performance and is powered by the NVIDIA DGX software stack. DDN A31 solutions can scale from single to multiple DGX-1s. Storage is a second component of the solution. The DDN and the AI200 is all NVIDIA parallel file storage appliance that's optimized for performance. The AI200 is specifically engineered to keep GPU computing resources fully utilized. The AI200 ensures maximum application productivity while easily managing to update data operations. It's offered in three capacity options and a compact tour U chassis. AI200 appliance can deliver up to 20 gigabytes a second of throughput and 350,000 IOPS. The DDN A3I architecture can scale up and out seamlessly over multiple appliances. The third component of the solution is a high performance, low latency, RDM capable network. Both EDR and InfiniBand, and 100 gigabit ethernet options are available. This provides flexibility, interesting seamless scaling and easy integration of the solution within any IT infrastructure. DDN A3I solutions within video DGX-1 brings together industry leading compute, storage and network technologies in a fully integrated and optimized package that's easy to deploy and manage. It's backed by deep expertise and enables customers to focus on what really matters. Extracting the most value from their data with unprecedented accuracy and velocity. >> Always great to hear the product. Let's hear the analyst's perspective. Now I'm joined by Dave Vellante, who's now with Wikibon, colleague here at Wikibon and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE. Dave welcome to theCUBE. Dave a lot of conversations about AI. What is it about today that is making AI so important to so many businesses? >> Well I think it's three things Peter. The first is the data we've been on this decade long aduped bandwagon and what that did is really focused organizations on putting data at the center of their business, and now they're trying to figure okay, how do we get more value of that? So the second piece of that is technology is now becoming available, so AI of course have been around forever but the infrastructure to support that, GPUs, the processing power, flash storage, deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow have really have started to come to the marketplace. So the technology is now available to act on that data, and I think the third is people are trying to get digital right. This is it about digital transformation. Digital meets data. We talked about that all the time and every corner office is trying to figure out what their digital strategy should be. So there try to remain competitive and they see automation, and artificial intelligence, machine intelligence applied to that data as a lynch pan of their competitiveness. >> So a lot of people talk about the notion of data as a source value in some and the presumption that's all going to the cloud. Is that accurate? >> Oh yes, it's funny that you say that because as you know, we're done a lot of work of this and I think the thing that's important organizations have realized in the last 10 years is the idea of bringing five megabytes of compute to a petabyte of data is far more valuable. And as a result a pendullum is really swinging in many different directions. One being the edge, data is going to say there, and certainly the cloud is a major force. And most of the data still today lives on premises, and that's where most of the data os likely going to stay. And so no all the data is not going to go into the cloud. >> It's not the central cloud? >> That's right, the central public cloud. You can redefined the boundaries of the cloud and the key is you want to bring that cloud like experience to the data. We've talked about that a lot in the Wikibon and Cube communities, and that's all about the simplification and cloud business models. >> So that suggest pretty strongly that there is going to continue to be a relationship between choices about hardware infrastructure on premises, and the success at making some of these advance complex workloads, run and scream and really drive some of that innovative business capabilities. As you think about that what is it about AI technologies or AI algorithms and applications that have an impact on storage decisions? >> Well, the characteristics of the workloads are going to be often times is going to be largely unstructured data that's going to be small files. There's going to a lot of those small files, and they're going to be randomly distributed, and as a result, that's going to change the way in which people are going to design systems to accommodate those workloads. There's going to be a lot more bandwidth. There's going to be a lot more parallelism in those systems in order to accommodate and keep those CPUs busy. And yeah, we're going to talk about but the workload characteristics are changing so the fundamental infrastructure has to change as well. >> And so our goal ultimately is to ensure that we keep these new high performing GPUs saturated by flowing data to them without a lot of spiky performance throughout the entire subsystem. We've got that right? >> Yeah, I think that's right, and that's when I was talking about parallelism, that's what you want to do. You want to be able to load up that processor especially these alternative processors like GPUs, and make sure that they stay busy. The other thing is when there's a problem, you don't want to have to restart the job. So you want to have real time error recovery, if you will. And that's been crucial in the high performance world for a long, long time on terms of, because these jobs as you know take a long, long time to the extent that you don't have to restart a job from ground zero. You can save a lot of money. >> Yeah especially as you said, as we start to integrate some of these AI applications with some of the operational applications that are actually recording your results of the work that's being performed or the prediction that's being made or the recommendation that's been offered. So I think ultimately, if we start thinking about this crucial role that AI workloads is going to have in business and that storage is going to have on AI, move more processes closer to data et cetera. That suggest that there's going to be some changes in the offering for the storage industry. What are your thinking about how storage interest is going to evolve over time? >> Well there's certainly a lot of hardware stuff that's going on. We always talk about software define but they say hardware stuff matters. If obviously flash doors changed the game from a spinning mechanical disc, and that's part of this. Also as I said the day before seeing a lot more parallelism, high bandwidth is critical. A lot of the discussion that we're having in our community is the affinity between HPC, high performance computing and big data, and I think that was pretty clear, and now that's evolving to AI. So the internal network, things like InfiniBand are pretty important. NVIDIA is coming onto the scene. So those are some of the things that we see. I think the other one is file systems. NFS tends to deal really well with unstructured data and data that is sequential. When you have all the-- >> Streaming. >> Exactly, and you have all this what we just describe as random nature and you have the need for parallelism. You really need to rethink file systems. File systems are again a lynch pan of getting the most of these AI workloads, and the others if we talk about the cloud model. You got to make this stuff simple. If we're going to bring AI and machine intelligence workloads to the enterprise, it's got to be manageable by enterprise admins. You're not going to be able to have a scientist be able to deploy this stuff, so it's got to be simple or cloud like. >> Fantastic, Dave Vellante, Wikibon. Thanks for much for being on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> We've had he analyst's perspective. Now tells take a look at some real numbers. Not a lot of companies has delivered a rich set of bench marks relating AI, storage and business outcomes. DDN has, let's take a video that they prepared describing the bench mark associated with these new products. >> DDN A3I within video DGX-1 is a fully integrated and optimized technology solution that provides massive acceleration for AI and DL applications. DDN has engaged extensive performance and interoperable testing programs in close collaboration with expert technology partners and customers. Performance testing has been conducted with synthetic throughputs in IOPS workloads. The results demonstrate that the DDN A3I parallel architecture delivers over 100,000 IOPS and over 10 gigabytes per second of throughput to a single DGX-1 application container. Testing with multiple container demonstrates linear scaling up to full saturation of the DGX-1 Zyo capabilities. These results show concurrent IO activity from four containers with an aggregate delivered performance of 40 gigabytes per second. The DDN A3I parallel architecture delivers true application acceleration, extensive interoperability and performance testing has been completed with a dozen popular DL frameworks on DGX-1. The results show that with the DDN A3I parallel architecture, DL applications consistently achieve a higher training throughput and faster completion times. In this example, Caffe achieves almost eight times higher training throughput on DDN A3I as well it completes over five times faster than when using a legacy file sharing architecture and protocol. Comprehensive test and results are fully documented in the DDN A3I solutions guide available from the DDN website. This test illustrates the DGX-1 GPU utilization and read activity from the AI 200 parallel storage appliance during a TensorFlow training integration. The green line shows that the DGX-1 be used to achieve maximum utilization throughout the test. The red line shows the AI200 delivers a steady stream of data to the application during the training process. In the graph below, we show the same test using a legacy file sharing architecture and protocol. The green line shows that the DGX-1 never achieves full GPU utilization and that the legacy file sharing architecture and protocol fails to sustain consistent IO performance. These results show that with DDN A3I, this DL application on the DGX-1 achieves maximum GPU product activity and completes twice as fast. This test then resolved is also documented in the DDN A3I solutions guide available from the DDN website. DDN A3I solutions within video DGX-1 brings together industry meaning compute, storage and network technologies in a fully integrated and optimized package that enables widely used DL frameworks to run faster, better and more reliably. >> You know, it's great to see real benchmarking data because this is a very important domain, and there is not a lot of benchmarking information out there around some of these other products that are available but let's try to turn that benchmarking information into business outcomes. And to do that we've got Kurt Kuckein back from DDN. Kurt, welcome back. Let's talk a bit about how are these high value outcomes That seeks with AI going to be achieved as a consequence of this new performance, faster capabilities et cetera. >> So there is a couple of considerations. The first consideration, I think, is just the selection of AI infrastructure itself. Right, we have customers telling us constantly that they don't know where to start. Now they have readily available reference architectures that tell them hey, here's something you can implement, get installed quickly, you're up and running your AI from day one. >> So the decision process for what to get is reduced. >> Exactly. >> Okay. >> Number two is, you're unlocking all ends of the investment with something like this, right. You're maximizing the performance on the GPU side, you're maximizing the performance on the ingest side for the storage. You're maximizing the throughput of the entire system. So you're really gaining the most out of your investment there. And not just gaining the most out of your investment but truly accelerating the application and that's the end goal, right, that we're looking for with customers. Plenty of people can deliver fast storage but if it doesn't impact the application and deliver faster results, cut run times down then what are you really gaining from having fast storage? And so that's where we're focused. We're focused on application acceleration. >> So simpler architecture, faster implementation based on that, integrated capabilities, ultimately, all revealing or all resulting in better application performance. >> Better application performance and in the end something that's more reliable as well. >> Kurt Kuckein, thanks so much for being on theCUBE again. So that's ends our prepared remarks. We've heard a lot of great stuff about the relationship between AI, infrastructure especially storage and business outcomes but here's your opportunity to go into crowd chat and ask your questions get your answers, share your stories, engage your peers and some of the experts that we've been talking with about this evolving relationship between these key technologies, and what it's going to mean for business. So I'm Peter Burris. Thank you very much for listening. Let's step into the crowd chat and really engage and get those key issues addressed.

[Music] [Applause] I'll Buena Burris and welcome to another cube conversation from our fantastic studios in beautiful palo alto california today we're going to be talking about what infrastructure can do to accelerate AI and specifically we're gonna use a relationship a burgeoning relationship between PDN and nvidia to describe what we can do to accelerate AI workloads by using higher performance smarter and more focused of infrastructure for computing now to have this conversation we've got two great guests here we've got Kurt ku kind who is the senior director of marketing at ddn and also Darren Johnson is a global director of technical marketing for enterprise and NVIDIA Kurt Gerron welcome to the cube thanks for thank you very much so let's get going on this because this is a very very important topic and I think it all starts with this notion of that there is a relationship that you guys have put forward Kurt once you describe it sure well so what we're announcing today is ddn's a3i architecture powered by Nvidia so it is a full rack level solution a reference architecture that's been fully integrated and fully tested to deliver an AI infrastructure very simply very completely so if we think about how this is gonna or why this is important AI workloads clearly have a special stress on underlying technology Darin talk to us a little bit about the nature of these workloads and why in particular things like GPUs and other technologies are so important to make them go fast absolutely and as you probably know AI is all about the data whether you're doing medical imaging whether you're doing natural language processing whatever it is it's all driven by the data the more data that you have the better results that you get but to drive that data into the GPUs you need great IO and that's why we're here today to talk about ddn and the partnership of how to bring that I owe to the GPUs on our dgx platforms so if we think about what you described a lot of small files off and randomly just riveted with nonetheless very high-profile jobs that just can't stop midstream and start over absolutely and if you think about the history of high-performance computing which is very similar to a I really I owe is just that lots of files you have to get it they're low latency high throughput and that's why ddn's probably nearly twenty years of experience working in that exact same domain is perfect because you get the parallel file system which gives you that throughput gives you that low latency just helps drive the GPU so we you'd mention HPC from 20 years of experience now it used to be that HPC you'd have scientists with a bunch of graduate students setting up some of these big honkin machines but now we're moving into the commercial domain you don't have graduate students running around you don't have very low cost high quality people you're you know a lot of administrators who nonetheless good people but a lot to learn so how does this relationship actually start making or bringing AI within reach of the commercial world exactly where this reference architecture comes in right so a customer doesn't need to start from scratch they have a design now that allows them to quickly implement AI it's something that's really easily deployable we've fully integrated this solution ddn has made changes to our parallel file system appliance to integrate directly within the DG x1 environment makes that even easier to deploy from there and extract the maximum performance out of this without having to run around and tune a bunch of knobs change a bunch of settings it's really gonna work out of the box and the you know nvidia has done more than just the DG x1 it's more than hardware you've done a lot of optimization of different of AI toolkits if Sarah I'm talking what about that Darin yeah so I mean talking about the example I use researchers in the past with HPC what we have today are data scientists data scientists understand pie tours they understand tensorflow they understand the frameworks they don't want to understand the underlying filesystem networking RDMA InfiniBand any of that they just want to be able to come in run their tensorflow get the data get the results and just turn that keep turning that whether it's a single GPU or 90 Jex's or as many dejection as you want so this solution helps bring that to customers much easier so those data scientists don't have to be system administrators so a reference architecture that makes things easier but that's more than just for some of these commercial things it's also the overall ecosystem new application providers application developers how is this going to impact the aggregate ecosystem it's growing up around the need to do AI related outcomes well I think one point that Darrin was getting to you there and one of the big effects is also as these ecosystems reach a point where they're going to need to scale right there's somewhere where ddn has tons of experience right so many customers are starting off with smaller data sets they still need the performance a parallel file system in that case is going to deliver that performance but then also as they grow right going from one GPU to 90 G X's is going to be an incredible amount of both performance scalability that they're going to need from their i/o as well as probably capacity scalability and that's another thing that we've made easy with a3i is being able to scale that environment seamlessly within a single namespace so that people don't have to deal with a lot of again tuning and turning of knobs to make this stuff work really well and drive those outcomes that they need as they're successful right so in the end it is the application that's most important to both of us right it's it's not the infrastructure it's making the discoveries faster it's processing information out in the field faster it's doing analysis of the MRI faster it's you know helping the doctors helping the anybody who's using this to really make faster decisions better decisions exactly and just to add to that I mean in automotive industry you have datasets that are from 50 to 500 petabytes and you need access to all that data all the time because you're constantly training and Retraining to create better models to create better autonomous vehicles and you need you need the performance to do that ddn helps bring that to bear and with this reference architecture simplifies it so you get the value add of nvidia gpus plus its ecosystem of software plus DD on its match made in heaven Darren Johnson Nvidia Curt Koo Kien ddn thanks very much for being on the cube thank you very much and I'm Peter burrs and once again I'd like to thank you for watching this cube conversation until next time [Music]

>> Dave Vellante, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, Peter. Good to see you. >> Good to see you too. So, Dave, lot of conversation about AI. What is about today that is making AI so important in so many businesses? >> Well, I think there's three things, Peter. The first is the data. We've been on this decade-long Hadoop bandwagon, and what that did is it really focused organizations on putting data at the center of their business. And now, they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we get more value out of that, so the second piece of that is the technology is now becoming available, so, AI, of course, has been around forever, but the infrastructure to support that, the GPUs, the processing power, flash storage, deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow and Caffe have started to come to the marketplace, so the technology is now available to act on that data, and I think the third is, people are trying to get digital right. This is about digital transformation. Digital means data, we talk about that all the time. And every corner office is trying to figure out what their digital strategy should be, so they're trying to remain competitive, and they see automation and artificial intelligence, machine intelligence applied to that data as a linchpin of their competitiveness. >> So, a lot of people talk about the notion of data as a source of value, and there's been some presumption that's all going to the cloud. Is that accurate? >> (laughs) Funny you say that, because, as you know, we've done a lot of work on this, and I think the thing that organizations have realized in the last 10 years is, the idea of bringing five megabytes of compute to petabyte of data is far more viable and as a result, the pendulum is really swinging in many different directions, one being the edge, data is going to stay there, certainly the cloud is a major force. And most of the data, still today, lives on premises, and that's where most of the data is likely going to stay, and so, no, all the data is not going to go into the cloud. >> At least not the central cloud. >> That's right, the central public cloud. You can maybe redefine the boundaries of the cloud. I think the key is, you want to bring that cloud-like experience to the data, we've talked about that a lot in the Wikibon and CUBE communities, and that's all about simplification and cloud business models. >> So that suggests pretty strongly that there is going to continue to be a relationship between choices about hardware infrastructure on premises and the success at making some of these advanced, complex workloads run and scream and really drive some of that innovative business capabilities. As you think about that, what is it about AI technologies or AI algorithms and applications that have an impact on storage decisions? >> Well, I mean, the characteristics of the workloads are going to be, oftentimes, largely unstructured data, there's going to be small files, there's going to be a lot of those small files, and they're going to be kind of randomly distributed, and as a result, that's going to change the way in which people are going to design systems to accommodate those workloads. There's going to be a lot more bandwidth, there's going to be a lot more parallelism in those systems in order to accommodate and keep those CPUs busy, you'll know, we're going to talk more about that, but the workload characteristics are changing, so the fundamental infrastructure has to change as well. >> And so our goal, ultimately, is to ensure that we can keep these new, high-performing GPUs saturated by flowing data to them without a lot of spiky performance throughout the entire subsystem, have I got that right? >> Yeah, I think that's right, that's when I was talking about parallelism, that's what you want to do, you want to be able to load up that processor, especially these alternative processors like GPUs, and make sure that they stay busy. You know, the other thing is, when there's a problem, you don't want to have to restart the job. So you want to have realtime error recovery, if you will. That's been crucial in the high performance world for a long, long time, because these jobs as you know, take a long, long, time, so to the extent that you don't have to restart a job from ground zero, you can save a lot of money. >> Yeah, especially as you said, as we start to integrate some of these AI applications with some of the operational implications, they're actually recording the results of the work that's being performed, or the prediction that's being made, or the recommendation that's being proffered. So I think, ultimately, if we start thinking about this crucial role that AI workloads are going to have in business, and that storage is going to have on AI, move more processing close to the data, et cetera, that suggests that there's going to be some changes in the offing for the storage industry. What are you thinking about how the storage industry is going to evolve over time? >> Well, there's certainly a lot of hardware stuff that's going on, we always talk about software definement, hardware still matters, right? So obviously, flash storage changed the game from spinning mechanical disk, and that's part of this. You're also, as I said before, seeing a lot more parallelism, high bandwidth is critical. Lot of the discussion we're having in our community is, the affinity between HPC, high performance computing, and big data, and I think that was pretty clear, and now that's evolving to AI, so the internal network, things like InifiBand are pretty important, NVMe is coming onto the scene. So those are some of the things that we see. I think the other one is file systems. NFS tends to deal really well with unstructured data and data that is sequential. When you have all this-- >> Streaming, for example. >> Exactly, and when you have all this, what we just described, this sort of random nature and you have the need for parallelism, you really need to rethink file systems. File systems are, again, a linchpin of getting the most out of these AI workloads. And I think the others, we talked about the cloud model, you got to make this stuff simple. If we're going to bring AI and machine intelligence workloads to the enterprise, it's got to be manageable by enterprise admins. You're not going to be able to have a scientist be able to deploy this stuff, so it got to be simpler, cloud-like. >> Fantastic, Dave Vellante, Wikibon, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> My pleasure.

>> What up universe? Welcome to our theCUBE conversation from our fantastic studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Today we're going to be talking about what infrastructure can do to accelerate AI. And specifically we're going to use a relationship, a burgeoning relationship between DDN and NVIDIA to describe what we can do to accelerate AI workloads by using higher performance, smarter, and more focused infrastructure for computing. Now to have this conversation, we've got two great guests, here. We've got Kurt Kuckein, who's the senior director of marketing at DDN. And also Darren Johnson, who's the global director of technical marketing for Enterprise and NVIDIA. Kurt, Darren, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks For having us. >> Thank you very much. >> So let's get going on this because this is a very, very important topic. And I think it all starts with this notion of that there is a relationship that you guys put forth. Kurt, why don't you describe it. >> So what we're announcing today is the ends A3I architecture, powered by NVIDIA. So it is a full, rack-level solution, a reference to architecture that's been fully integrated and fully tested to deliver an AI infrastructure very simply very completely. >> So if we think about how this or why this is important, AI workloads clearly have a special stress on underlying technology. Darren, talk to us a little bit about the nature of these workloads, and why in particular, things like GPU's and other technologies are so important to make them go fast. >> Absolutely. And as you probably know AI is all about the data. Whether you're doing medical imaging, or whether your doing actual language processing, whatever it is, it's all driven by the data. The more data that you have, the better results that you get. But to drive that data into the GPU's, you need great IO. And that's why we're here today, to talk about DDN and the partnership and how to bring that IO to the GPU's on our DJX platforms. >> So if we think about what you describe, a lot of small files, often randomly distributed, with nonetheless very high profile jobs that just can't stop this dream and start over. >> Absolutely. And if you think about the history of high-performance computing, which is very similar to AI, really IO is just that, lots of files, you have to get it there, low latency, high throughput and that's why DDN's probably nearly 20 years of experience working in that exact same domain is perfect. Because you get the parallel file system which gives you that throughput, gives you that low latency, just helps drive the GPU. >> So you mentioned HPC from twenty years of experience, now, it used to be that HPC you'd have some scientists with a bunch of graduate students, setting up some of these big, honking machines. But now we're moving with commercial domain. You don't have graduate students running around. You don't have very low cost, high quality people here. So, you know, there's a lot of administrators who nonetheless good people, but want to learn. So, how does this relationship actually start making or bringing AI within reach of the commercial world? Kurt, why don't- >> That's exactly where this reference architecture comes in right. So a customer doesn't need to start from scratch. They have a design now that allows them to quickly implement AI, It's something that's really easily deployable. We've fully integrated this solution. DDN has made changes to our parallel file system appliance to integrate directly within the DGX-1 environment. That makes that even easier to deploy from there. And extract the maximum performance out of this without having to run around and tune a bunch of knobs, change a bunch of settings, it's really going to work out of the box. >> And you know it's really done more than just the DGX-1, it's more than hardware. You've done a lot of optimization of different AI toolkits, et cetera et cetera. Talk a little about that Darren. >> Yeah so, I mean, talking about the example used, researchers in the past with HPC, what we have today are data scientists. Data scientists understand pi charts, they understand tenser flow, they understand the frameworks. They don't want to understand the underlying file system, networking, RDMA, InfiniBand, any of that. They just want to be able to come in, run their tenser flow, get the data, get the results. And just churn that, keep churning that, whether it's a single GPU or 90 DJX's or as many DJX's as you want. So this solution helps bring that to customers much easier so those data scientists don't have to be system administrators. >> So, reference architecture that makes things easier. But it's more than just for some of these commercial things. It's also the overall ecosystem, you have application providers, application developers. How is this going to impact the average ecosystem that's growing up around the need to do AI related outcomes? >> Well, I think the one point that Darren was getting to there, and one of the big impacts is also as these ecosystems reach a point where they're going to need a scale. There's somewhere where DDN has tons of experience. So many customers are starting off with smaller data sets, they still need the performance, the parallel file system in that case is going to deliver that performance. But then also, as they grow, going from one GPU to 90 DJX's is going to be an incredible amount of both performance scalability that they're going to need from their IO, as well as probably capacity, scalability. And that's another thing that we've made easy with A3I, is being able to scale that environment seamlessly, within a single name space so that people don't have to deal with a lot of, again, tuning and turning of knobs to make this stuff work really well and drive those outcomes that they need as their successful. In the end, it is the application that's most important to both of us. It's not the end of a structure, it's making the discoveries faster, it's processing the information out in the field faster, it's doing analysis of the MRI faster, and helping the doctor, helping anybody who's using this to really make faster decisions, better decisions. >> Exactly. And just to add to that, in automotive industry, you have data sets that are from 50 to 500 petabytes, and you need access to all that data, all the time, because you're constantly training and retraining to create better models, to create better autonomous vehicles. And you need the performance to do that. DDN helps bring that to bear, and with this reference architecture, simplifies it. So you get the value add of InfiniData GPU's plus its ecosystem is software plus DDN is a match made in Heaven. >> Darren Johnson, NVIDIA, Kurt Kuckein, DDN. Thanks very much for being on theCube. >> Thank you very much. >> Glad I could be here. >> And I'm Peter Burns, and once again I'd like to thank you for watching this Cube Conversation. Until next time.

(microphone not on) >> be 47 (laughter) >> Are you ready? >> Here we go, alright and, three, two... >> You know it's great to see real benchmarking data, because this is a very important domain and there is not a lot of benchmarking information out there around some of these other products that are available. But let's try to to turn that benchmarking information into business outcomes, and to do that we got, Kurt Kuckein, back from DDN. Kurt welcome back let's talk a bit about how are these high value outcomes that business seeks with AI going to be achieved as a consequence of this new performance, faster capabilities, etcetera. >> So there's a couple of considerations, the first consideration I think is just the selection of AI infrastructure itself. Right, we have customers telling us constantly that they don't know where to start. Now that they have readily available reference architectures that tell them, hey here's something you can implement get installed quickly, you're up and running, running your AI from day one. >> So the decision process for what to get is reduced. >> Exactly. >> Okay. >> Uh, number two is you're unlocking all ends of the investment with something like this right? You're maximizing the performance on the GPU side. You're maximizing the performance on the ingest side for the storage. You're maximizing the through-put of the entire system, so you're really gaining the most out of your investment there. And not just gaining the most out of the investment, but truly accelerating the application and that's the end goal right, that we're looking for with customers. Plenty of people can deliver fast storage, but it does- If it doesn't impact the application and deliver faster results, cut run times down, then what are you really gaining from having fast storage? And so that where we're focused, we're focused on application acceleration. >> So simpler architecture, faster implementation based on that, integrated capabilities, ultimately, all revealing or all resulting in, better application performance. >> Better application performance, and in the end something that's more reliable as well. >> Kurt, thanks for again for being on The Cube. >> Thanks for having me.

(laughing) >> This is V-3. >> Alec, you're going to open up, we're going to cut, come to you in a second. Good luck, buddy. Okay, here we go. Alright Peter, ready? >> Yup. >> And we're coming to you in. >> Hold on guys, sorry, I lied. (laughing) V-2, V-3, there it is. Okay, ready. >> Now you're ready? >> Yup. >> You're ready ready? Okay here we go, ready and, three, two. >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another Cube Conversation from our wonderful studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Great conversation today, we're going to be talking about the relationship between AI, business, and especially some of the new infrastructure technologies in the storage part of the stack. And to join me in this endeavor is Kurt Kuckein, who's a senior director of product marketing at DDN. Kurt Kuckein, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks, Peter, happy to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about DDN to start. >> So DDN is a storage company that's been around for 20 years. We've got a legacy in high-performance computing, and that's what we see a lot of similarities with this new AI workload. DDN is well-known in that HPC community; if you look at the top 100 supercomputers in the world we're attached to 75-percent of them and so we have a fundamental understanding of that type of scalable need that's where we're focused, we're focused on performance requirements, we're focused on scalability requirements, which can mean multiple things, right, it can mean the scaling of performance, it can mean the scaling of capacity, and we're very flexible. >> Well let me stop you and say, so you've got a lot of customers in the high-performance world, and a lot of those customers are at the vanguard of moving to some of these new AI workloads. What are customers saying? With this significant engagement that you have with the best and the brightest out there, what are they saying about this transition to AI? >> Well I think it's fascinating that we kind of have a bifurcated customer base here, where we have those traditionalists who probably have been looking at AI for over 40 years, right, and they've been exploring this idea and they've gone through the peaks and troughs in the promise of AI, and then contraction because CPUs weren't powerful enough. Now we've got this emergence of GPUs in the supercomputing world, and if you look at how the supercomputing world has expanded in the last few years, it is through investment in GPUs. And then we've got an entirely different segment, which is a much more commercial segment, and they're maybe newly invested in this AI arena, right, they don't have the legacy of 30, 40 years of research behind them, and they are trying to figure out exactly, you know, what do I do here? A lot of companies are coming to us, hey, I have an AI initiative, well what's behind it? Well, we don't know yet, but we've got to have something and they don't understand where is this infrastructure going to come from. >> So the general availability of AI technologies, and obviously Flash has been a big part of that, very high-speed networks within data centers, virtualization certainly helps as well, now opens up the possibility for using these algorithms, some of which have been around for a long time, but have required very specialized bespoke configurations of hardware, to the enterprise. That still begs the question, there are some differences between high-performance computing workloads and AI workloads. Let's start with some of the, what are the similarities, and then let's explore some of the differences. >> So the biggest similarity, I think, is just it's an intractable, hard IO problem, right, at least from the storage perspective. It requires a lot of high throughput, depending on where those IO characteristics are from, it can be very small-file, high-op-intensive type workflows, but it needs the ability of the entire infrastructure to deliver all of that seamlessly from end to end. >> So really high-performance throughput so that you can get to the data you need and keep this computing element saturated. >> Keeping the GPU saturated is really the key, that's where the huge investment is. >> So how do AI and HPC workloads differ? >> So how they're fundamentally different is often AI workloads operate on a smaller scale in terms of the amount of capacity, at least today's AI workloads. As soon as a project encounters success, what our forecast is, is those things will take off and you'll want to apply those algorithms bigger and bigger data sets. But today, you know, we encounter things like 10-terabyte data sets, 50-terabyte data sets and a lot of customers are focused only on that. But what happens when you're successful, how do you scale your current infrastructure to petabytes and multi-petabytes when you'll need it in the future? >> So when I think of HPC, I think of often very, very big batch jobs, very, very large, complex data sets. When I think about AI, like image processing or voice processing, whatever else it might be, I think of a lot of small files, randomly accessed. >> Right. >> That require nonetheless some very complex processing, that you don't want to have to restart all the time. >> Right. >> And a degree of simplicity that's required to make sure that you have the people that can do it. Have I got that right? >> You've got it right. Now one, I think, misconception is, is on the HPC side, right, that whole random small file thing has come in in the last five, 10 years and it's something DDN's been working on quite a bit, right. Our legacy was in high-performance throughput workloads, but the workloads have evolved so much on the HPC side as well, and, as you posited at the beginning, so much of it has become AI and deep-learning research >> Right, so they look a lot more alike. >> They do look a lot more alike. >> So if we think about the revolving relationship now between some of these new data-first workloads, AI-oriented, change the way the business operates types of stuff, what do you anticipate is going to be the future of the relationship between AI and storage? >> Well, what we foresee really is that the explosion in AI needs and AI capabilities is going to mimic what we already see and really drive what we see on the storage side, right? We've been showing that graph for years and years and years of just everything going up and to the right, but as AI starts working on itself and improving itself, as the collection means keep getting better and more sophisticated and have increased resolutions, whether you're talking about cameras or in life sciences, acquisition capabilities just keep getting better and better and the resolutions get better and better, it's more and more data, right? And you want to be able to expose a wide variety of data to these algorithms; that's how they're going to learn faster. And so what we see is that the data-centric part of the infrastructure is going to need to scale, even if you're starting today with a smaller workload. >> Kurt Kuckein, DDN, thanks very much for being on The Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> And once again, this is Peter Burris with another Cube Conversation, thank you very much for watching. Until next time. (electronic whooshing)