by Guy D’Hauwers, Sales Director HPC & AI
As digital transformation continues to drive high performance workloads and initiatives across a multitude of industries, the evolution of data storage and processing is equally changing at breakneck speed. Today’s fast-paced enterprises no longer have the luxury of waiting to integrate and deploy hardware servers. Instead, the ability to scale their storage capacity on an as-needed, on-demand basis is becoming critical.
At atNorth, we have recognized this growing need, which is why we have been working closely with global leading storage provider, WEKA to bring the WEKA Data Platform for AI, to our customers. This partnership allows WEKA’s data platform to be offered as a subscription service via atNorth’s High Performance Computing as a service (HPCaaS) technology.
A legacy infrastructure is a piece of equipment or software that is no longer supported. The infrastructure continues to satisfy the requirements for which it was first intended, but growth is not permitted.
Traditionally, High Performance Computing (HPC) has been run on-prem in order to provide the computational execution required to run demanding workloads such as the massive data pipelines required for AI and ML technologies to learn and improve the decision-making processes.
Businesses have had to buy physical data storage hardware that can often come at a high cost and is not easily scalable for those that are experiencing growth or have more flexible needs. For enterprise businesses to successfully deploy AI projects in production environments, the infrastructure must be able to process very large data sets rapidly as well as ingest structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources.
This means that HPC storage architectures are constantly moving data from one storage system to another, (object storage for archival data, NAS for persistent storage, parallel file systems for fast storage) increasing complexity and management and slowing results with expanding data transfer times.
Cloud-based High-Performance Computing as a service (HPCaaS) technology runs on a system of remote servers over the internet which eliminates the need for dedicated local servers and infrastructure at each location, and also the need for local systems maintenance and administration personnel.
WEKA replaces decades of data infrastructure compromise with a subscription software-based data platform that is purpose-built to support modern performance-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The platform delivers the radical simplicity, epic performance, and infinite scale required to support enterprise AI workloads in virtually any location. Whether that is on-prem, in the cloud or between platforms, The WEKA platform accelerates every step of the enterprise AI data pipeline – from data ingestion, cleansing and modelling, to training, validation and inference.
HPCaaS also supports data resilience by promoting off-site redundancy with continuous backups not to mention the flexibility to work from any device in any location. It is also protected by robust encryption and cybersecurity measures that make it arguably safer than its physical infrastructure contemporaries.
This partnership lowers the entry point for high performance data storage, making WEKA more accessible to leading organizations of today and tomorrow and allows atNorth to provide its customers with a top-tier flexible performance storage solution that can grow and scale with business needs.
For clients (such as visual content specialists), the demand for data storage relates to the projects they work on. The option to purchase a HPCaaS solution that can scale up and down with their changing demands not only makes for a more cost-effective solution but also aggregates the power of multiple high-end processors, boosted with GPUs to provide quick and accurate results.
The combination of the atNorth High Performance Computing as a service (HPCaaS) along with WEKA results in an optimized environment to support any workload with increased capacity, delivering performance in a highly scalable and instantaneous way.