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NetApp Solutions

Technology Overview

Contributors kevin-hoke mboglesby
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This section provides a technology overview for NVIDIA AI Enterprise with NetApp and VMware.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise

NVIDIA AI Enterprise is an end-to-end, cloud-native suite of AI and data analytics software that is optimized, certified, and supported by NVIDIA to run on VMware vSphere with NVIDIA-Certified Systems. This software facilitates the simple and rapid deployment, management, and scaling of AI workloads in the modern hybrid cloud environment.

NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC)

NVIDIA NGC hosts a catalog of GPU-optimized software for AI practitioners to develop their AI solutions. It also provides access to various AI services including NVIDIA Base Command for model training, NVIDIA Fleet Command to deploy and monitor models, and the NGC Private Registry for securely accessing and managing proprietary AI software. Also, NVIDIA AI Enterprise customers can request support through the NGC portal.

VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere is VMware's virtualization platform, which transforms data centers into aggregated computing infrastructures that include CPU, storage, and networking resources. vSphere manages these infrastructures as a unified operating environment, and provides administrators with the tools to manage the data centers that participate in that environment.

The two core components of vSphere are ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the virtualization platform where administrators create and run virtual machines and virtual appliances. vCenter Server is the service through which administrators manage multiple hosts connected in a network and pool host resources.

NetApp ONTAP

ONTAP 9, the latest generation of storage management software from NetApp, enables businesses to modernize infrastructure and transition to a cloud-ready data center. Leveraging industry-leading data management capabilities, ONTAP enables the management and protection of data with a single set of tools, regardless of where that data resides. You can also move data freely to wherever it is needed: the edge, the core, or the cloud. ONTAP 9 includes numerous features that simplify data management, accelerate, and protect critical data, and enable next generation infrastructure capabilities across hybrid cloud architectures.

Simplify data management

Data management is crucial to enterprise IT operations and data scientists so that appropriate resources are used for AI applications and training AI/ML datasets. The following additional information about NetApp technologies is out of scope for this validation but might be relevant depending on your deployment.

ONTAP data management software includes the following features to streamline and simplify operations and reduce your total cost of operation:

  • Inline data compaction and expanded deduplication. Data compaction reduces wasted space inside storage blocks, and deduplication significantly increases effective capacity. This applies to data stored locally and data tiered to the cloud.

  • Minimum, maximum, and adaptive quality of service (AQoS). Granular quality of service (QoS) controls help maintain performance levels for critical applications in highly shared environments.

  • NetApp FabricPool. Provides automatic tiering of cold data to public and private cloud storage options, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and NetApp StorageGRID storage solution. For more information about FabricPool, see TR-4598: FabricPool best practices.

Accelerate and protect data

ONTAP delivers superior levels of performance and data protection and extends these capabilities in the following ways:

  • Performance and lower latency. ONTAP offers the highest possible throughput at the lowest possible latency.

  • Data protection. ONTAP provides built-in data protection capabilities with common management across all platforms.

  • NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE). ONTAP offers native volume-level encryption with both onboard and External Key Management support.

  • Multitenancy and multifactor authentication. ONTAP enables sharing of infrastructure resources with the highest levels of security.

Future-proof infrastructure

ONTAP helps meet demanding and constantly changing business needs with the following features:

  • Seamless scaling and nondisruptive operations. ONTAP supports the nondisruptive addition of capacity to existing controllers and to scale-out clusters. Customers can upgrade to the latest technologies, such as NVMe and 32Gb FC, without costly data migrations or outages.

  • Cloud connection. ONTAP is the most cloud-connected storage management software, with options for software-defined storage (ONTAP Select) and cloud-native instances (Google Cloud NetApp Volumes) in all public clouds.

  • Integration with emerging applications. ONTAP offers enterprise-grade data services for next generation platforms and applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and Industry 4.0, by using the same infrastructure that supports existing enterprise apps.

NetApp DataOps Toolkit

The NetApp DataOps Toolkit is a Python-based tool that simplifies the management of development/training workspaces and inference servers that are backed by high-performance, scale-out NetApp storage. Key capabilities include:

  • Rapidly provision new high-capacity JupyterLab workspaces that are backed by high-performance, scale-out NetApp storage.

  • Rapidly provision new NVIDIA Triton Inference Server instances that are backed by enterprise-class NetApp storage.

  • Near-instaneously clone high-capacity JupyterLab workspaces in order to enable experimentation or rapid iteration.

  • Near-instaneously save snapshots of high-capacity JupyterLab workspaces for backup and/or traceability/baselining.

  • Near-instaneously provision, clone, and snapshot high-capacity, high-performance data volumes.