Dell unveils enhanced storage for higher AI & GenAI performance

Dell Technologies has unveiled new storage improvements designed to meet a rising demand for more rapid AI and generative AI (GenAI) performance. The new developments have been formulated to respond to an enhanced customer requirement for an AI-ready infrastructure, offering advanced storage that enables swift access to data for AI workloads, whether it is located on-premises, at the peripheries, or in public clouds.

The president of Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, Arthur Lewis, remarked: "Storage performance is a critical factor for successful AI and GenAI outcomes. Customers are relying on us to continually push the boundaries of storage innovation, including removing data access bottlenecks that limit the throughput and scalability of compute-intensive applications." He noted that by providing rapid, efficient and secure access to data, it facilitates a vast array of AI and GenAI possibilities.

With the new upgrades on Dell PowerScale, a leading scale-out file storage system, there is the ability to better cater to increased customer demands for higher AI and GenAI performance. Furthermore, enhancements to PowerScale OneFS software mean that organisations can prepare, train, fine-tune and inference AI models with a greater speed. Dan Keyworth, the director of business technology at McLaren Racing, cited this improvement as vital in supporting high-performance storage with computing capabilities necessary for successful AI application.

Another crucial aspect of Dell's upgrades is the validation of Dell PowerScale for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Dell has developed its file and object storage solutions with the customer in mind, allowing them to modernise their infrastructure with an AI-ready foundation for intensive workloads such as those related to GenAI. Scott Sinclair, practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group, stated that PowerScale's performance improvements will help customers accelerate AI model training and fine-tuning, enabling them to make informed business decisions based on their data with heightened speed and accuracy.

A noteworthy feature of this collaboration is the anticipation of Dell's solution becoming the first ethernet storage solution validated on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. As a result, customers will have the ability to accelerate their AI and GenAI initiatives with Dell's industry-leading network-attached storage.

Dell Technologies is also paving the way for multicloud strategies, with almost 87% of companies now embracing this approach. Dell's APEX File Storage for Microsoft Azure will deliver enterprise-class file performance and management capabilities within the Microsoft Azure framework, which will easily fulfil the requirements of performance-intensive AI and machine learning applications. The collaboration with Databricks manifests with customers being permitted to choose from a variety of large language models and retrain a foundational model using their proprietary data stored in Dell APEX File Storage.

These upgrades will be globally available this month with the Dell PowerScale OneFS enhancements. The next-generation all-flash Dell PowerScale systems and smart scale-out feature are predicted to be globally available in the first half of 2024. Dell PowerScale's validation with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2024. Dell APEX for File Storage for Microsoft Azure is slated to be globally accessible in the first half of 2024.