Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to change lives. From fueling medical discoveries to smart collars that can decipher and display the emotions of our household pets, this emerging technology is enabling organisations to innovate. According to IDC[1], by 2025, AI-powered enterprises will see a 100% increase in productivity and new product introduction success rates, higher than those of their non-intelligent peers. By being able to anticipate the market and operational changes with AI, organisations will respond much faster than their competitors. They will be agile enough to adapt to changes in the market and innovate.

Hence, accelerating AI solutions for businesses should be the focus for organizations in India. For example, HPC workloads are becoming more data centric and adding AI technologies to advance the capabilities of traditional HPC modeling and simulation. In the next few years, HPC technologies, such as HPC-enabled machine learning training, will go from experimentation models to production models. As CTOs and CIOs in India look to create an enterprise infrastructure that provides robust performance and scalability for large and highly complex AI models while keeping deployment costs low, the answer may lie in HPC for three key reasons:

· Data analytics: Businesses relying heavily on data analytics generate new insights which improve efficiencies and give them a competitive edge. However, when it comes to analysing large sets of unstructured data that are exponentially increasing in volume and velocity, traditional IT infrastructure is often hamstrung due to slow storage speeds. To adapt to significantly larger data sets and compute-intensive analytics processes, researchers are looking to exascale computing systems, capable of performing one quintillion calculations per second. Powered with HPC, these advanced performance systems are expected to have a profound impact in the faster identification of pandemics, discovery of effective medication and indication of hazardous weather conditions before they happen.

· Acceleration of AI deployments: According to a study, in India, almost 70% of organisations are currently investing in Artificial Intelligence to deliver better business results. As HPC and AI continue to converge and evolve to involve more use cases across industries, the possibilities are nearly endless. Organisations are increasingly looking for pre-designed and pre-validated solutions to generate value instead of constructing IT infrastructure. To help companies with roadblocks involved in setting up an AI system, large vendors are also beginning to introduce reference architectures together with HPC infrastructure for data scientists and researchers working. With HPC and software combined, launching new AI applications is becoming easier and faster. Technology vendors are helping data scientists focus less on maintaining AI systems but more on experimenting, exploring and uncovering insights. Organizations do not need to walk their AI journey alone. By collaborating and working with end-to-end technology infrastructure providers, organisations can co-design and customise unique HPC infrastructures to meet AI research, development and AI model deployment needs.

· Growing support for HPC globally and in India: The business benefits of AI are being increasingly recognised, with infrastructure providers now helping the research community and customers capitalise on HPC, expanding it from a niche market to a broader audience. More than ever, customers and partners have access to guidance from technology vendors on how to kick-start their AI initiatives including design, installation, maintenance and most importantly, delivering tangible business outcomes for their organisations. Organisations are focused on promoting open collaboration, bringing together the wide-ranging experience and knowledge of technology developers, service providers and end-users in a worldwide forum that promotes the advancement of innovative, powerful HPC and AI solutions.

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Dell Technologies has announced Dell EMC PowerScale, a new family of storage systems engineered with storage software and server hardware to capture and capitalise on unstructured data, such as documents, images, videos and social media content.

“The amount of unstructured data enterprises store as file or object storage is expected to triple by 2024, and there are no signs of it slowing,” says Dell Technologies storage president and general manager Dan Inbar. 

“In this data era, businesses need a simple, seamless and cost-effective way to store and use unstructured data to innovate, create differentiation and bring products to market faster. The Dell EMC PowerScale family provides the foundation companies need to unlock the potential of their data, no matter where it resides, and use it to drive meaningful business impact.”

Dell EMC PowerScale runs on OneFS, the operating system that powers EMC Isilon. 

The PowerScale family features new 1U PowerEdge-based PowerScale all-flash and NVMe nodes and existing Isilon all-flash, hybrid and archive nodes running the OneFS 9.0 operating system.

It delivers up to 15.8 million input-output operations per second (IOPS) per cluster, offering performance to handle demanding AI, analytics, IOT, digital media, healthcare and life sciences workloads.

New all-flash PowerScale F200 nodes bring up to five times more performance than its predecessor. Enhanced inline data reduction makes the platform up to six times more efficient.

PowerScale can start small and grow to massive, petabyte-scale.

• Scale without disruption: PowerScale clusters can scale from 11TB raw capacity to 60PB and millions of file operations without disruption or downtime. Nodes can be added to either PowerScale or an existing Isilon cluster in 60 seconds.
   
• Intelligent automation: With smart scale-out capabilities, PowerScale distributes resources effectively so that customers can get the most performance out of a cluster. 
   
• Resilient and efficient: Through flexible failover policies, PowerScale delivers up to 85% storage utilisation across a cluster and can sustain multi-node failures.
   
• Programmable infrastructure: With support for a number of leading management and container orchestration frameworks, such as Kubernetes, and Ansible, customers can streamline application development and reduce deployment timeframes.

Dell Technologies makes it easy for customers to understand their data and storage infrastructure health through software included with PowerScale.

• Put data to work: DataIQ software helps companies extract business value from unstructured data, typically uncategorised and found in siloes throughout businesses. DataIQ breaks down data silos by delivering a single view of file and object data across Dell EMC, third-party and public cloud storage. Users can gain better control over their data, ensure the right teams have access to it, and make the most of their investment by ensuring data is stored on the right tier within their storage environment. 
   
• Proactive health monitoring: CloudIQ infrastructure monitoring and analytics software combines machine learning and human intelligence to provide real-time performance and capacity analysis as well as historical tracking for a single view of Dell EMC infrastructure.

PowerScale supports a wide variety of file protocols and customers can easily deploy it to meet their infrastructure needs.

• Any application: PowerScale OneFS 9.0 features broad multiprotocol support, including new S3 support for modern apps relying on object storage. Additional support for protocols including NFS, SMB and HDFS, allow customers to run a large number of traditional and modern applications without compatibility concerns.
   
• Deployment flexibility: PowerScale is easily deployed in core data centres, in edge locations or as part of a multi-cloud strategy. The compact 1U footprint and minimum cluster size of new all-flash F200 and NVMe F600 PowerScale nodes make it an ideal option for edge deployments.
   
• Multi-cloud support: PowerScale for Multi-cloud can directly connect to all major public clouds as a managed service – ideal for customers looking to move or deploy demanding apps in the cloud. Google Cloud customers looking to save time and management complexity can choose Dell Technologies Cloud PowerScale for Google Cloud, a native cloud service that combines the performance, scale, and consistent experience of PowerScale with the economics and simplicity of Google Cloud.

With Dell Technologies On Demand, PowerScale customers can respond to workload spikes and new service requests with elastic capacity and cloud economics. 

Several flexible pay-per-use choices with short-and-long term commitment options are available, including a one year term for flexible consumption.

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