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Improving Application Performance with NVMe Storage - Part 3

NVMe Storage Use Cases and Summary: Benefits of NVMe storage for AI/ML
Zivan Ori

Start with Part 1: The Rise of AI and ML Driving Parallel Computing Requirements

Start with Part 2: Local versus Shared Storage for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

NVMe Storage Use Cases

NVMe storage's strong performance, combined with the capacity and data availability benefits of shared NVMe storage over local SSD, makes it a strong solution for AI / ML infrastructures of any size. There are several AI / ML focused use cases to highlight.

■ Financial Analytics – Financial services and financial technology (FinTech) are increasingly turning to automation and artificial intelligence to fuel their decision making processes for investments. Using a mix of historical data and financial modeling, one platform can provide the horsepower required for predicting future investment strategies for their financial customers.

■ Image Recognition in Manufacturing – Manufacturing has long used automation in their production lines to increase the output capacity of their production systems, scaling from hundreds of units to thousands or even millions of units per hour. The financial impact of a quality issue on the production line can be devastating if not caught in a timely manner. Real-time image recognition of photos of manufactured parts is essential to determining whether a part meets the quality standards required, as well as capturing systematic quality issues in real-time.

■ Car Services – Ride sharing apps have given rise to a new paradigm in public transit, allowing users and drivers to connect quickly and easily as needed. Ride sharing companies use AI / ML for traffic modeling to position drivers where they are most needed based on both past and current ride sharing requests. This increases the drivers' potential revenue by reducing drive times as well as increases customer satisfaction through reduced wait times, both of which improve the revenue potential for the ride sharing company.

Beyond AI / ML, one vendor also provides more generalized computing services for their customers. They provide storage capacity for cloud services, using OpenStack and Kubernetes in conjunction with NVMe storage for high performance storage. In addition, they also leverage NVMe storage for big data analytics, using spark applications to perform multiple types of data analytics tasks, such as SQL, data mining and more.

Summary: Benefits of NVMe storage for AI/ML

NVMe storage is an ideal solution for countless AI / ML workloads, especially machine learning for multiple applications. With NVMe storage, you can:

■ Create and manage larger shared data-sets for training – By separating out storage capacity from the compute nodes, data-sets for machine learning training can scale up to 1PB. As the data-set grows and more NVMe storage is brought online, performance grows as well, rather than being limited by legacy storage controller bottlenecks.

■ Overcome the capacity limitations of local SSDs in GPU nodes – With limited space for SSD media, GPU nodes have limited capacity to manage larger datasets. With NVMe storage, NVMe volumes can be dynamically provisioned over high performance Ethernet or InfiniBand networks.

■ Accelerate epoch time of machine learning by as much as 10x – By leveraging high performance NVMe-oF, NVMe storage eliminates the latency bottlenecks of older storage protocols and unleashes the parallelism inherent to the NVMe protocol. Every GPU node has direct, parallel access to the media at the lowest possible latency.

■ Improve the utilization of GPUs – Having GPUs rest idle due to slow access to data for processing is costly. By offloading storage access to the idle CPUs, and delivering storage performance at the speed of local SSD, NVMe storage ensures that the GPU-nodes are kept busy with fast access to data.

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Improving Application Performance with NVMe Storage - Part 3

NVMe Storage Use Cases and Summary: Benefits of NVMe storage for AI/ML
Zivan Ori

Start with Part 1: The Rise of AI and ML Driving Parallel Computing Requirements

Start with Part 2: Local versus Shared Storage for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

NVMe Storage Use Cases

NVMe storage's strong performance, combined with the capacity and data availability benefits of shared NVMe storage over local SSD, makes it a strong solution for AI / ML infrastructures of any size. There are several AI / ML focused use cases to highlight.

■ Financial Analytics – Financial services and financial technology (FinTech) are increasingly turning to automation and artificial intelligence to fuel their decision making processes for investments. Using a mix of historical data and financial modeling, one platform can provide the horsepower required for predicting future investment strategies for their financial customers.

■ Image Recognition in Manufacturing – Manufacturing has long used automation in their production lines to increase the output capacity of their production systems, scaling from hundreds of units to thousands or even millions of units per hour. The financial impact of a quality issue on the production line can be devastating if not caught in a timely manner. Real-time image recognition of photos of manufactured parts is essential to determining whether a part meets the quality standards required, as well as capturing systematic quality issues in real-time.

■ Car Services – Ride sharing apps have given rise to a new paradigm in public transit, allowing users and drivers to connect quickly and easily as needed. Ride sharing companies use AI / ML for traffic modeling to position drivers where they are most needed based on both past and current ride sharing requests. This increases the drivers' potential revenue by reducing drive times as well as increases customer satisfaction through reduced wait times, both of which improve the revenue potential for the ride sharing company.

Beyond AI / ML, one vendor also provides more generalized computing services for their customers. They provide storage capacity for cloud services, using OpenStack and Kubernetes in conjunction with NVMe storage for high performance storage. In addition, they also leverage NVMe storage for big data analytics, using spark applications to perform multiple types of data analytics tasks, such as SQL, data mining and more.

Summary: Benefits of NVMe storage for AI/ML

NVMe storage is an ideal solution for countless AI / ML workloads, especially machine learning for multiple applications. With NVMe storage, you can:

■ Create and manage larger shared data-sets for training – By separating out storage capacity from the compute nodes, data-sets for machine learning training can scale up to 1PB. As the data-set grows and more NVMe storage is brought online, performance grows as well, rather than being limited by legacy storage controller bottlenecks.

■ Overcome the capacity limitations of local SSDs in GPU nodes – With limited space for SSD media, GPU nodes have limited capacity to manage larger datasets. With NVMe storage, NVMe volumes can be dynamically provisioned over high performance Ethernet or InfiniBand networks.

■ Accelerate epoch time of machine learning by as much as 10x – By leveraging high performance NVMe-oF, NVMe storage eliminates the latency bottlenecks of older storage protocols and unleashes the parallelism inherent to the NVMe protocol. Every GPU node has direct, parallel access to the media at the lowest possible latency.

■ Improve the utilization of GPUs – Having GPUs rest idle due to slow access to data for processing is costly. By offloading storage access to the idle CPUs, and delivering storage performance at the speed of local SSD, NVMe storage ensures that the GPU-nodes are kept busy with fast access to data.

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...