Dell VxRail

VxRail is the HCI appliance of choice for customers who have standardized on VMware. VxRail delivers a curated experience that accelerates data center modernization. Deep integration between VxRail System Software and VMware HCI software enables a seamless experience, familiar management, and committed 30-day synchronous releases of new VMware HCI updates. Dell Technologies extends the quality of experience even further with ongoing testing and validation and a single source for support.

VxRail is continuously enhancing ease of use and functionality, delivering Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 automation at scale across core, edge, and cloud deployments. Also, VxRail enables single-click, nondisruptive updates for fast, reliable, and efficient life cycle management all in a single upgrade cycle. This functionality brings a new level of simplicity to your experience, providing operational freedom from infrastructure maintenance. VxRail delivers a comprehensive, automated approach to operations and life cycle management. 

Dell PowerEdge servers

PowerEdge servers—such as the R750xa, R740xd, R7525—are built for scale-out workloads like AI, with the latest processors, smart NICs, accelerators, memory, and NVMe storage in a wide range of configuration and connectivity options. The following table lists the PowerEdge servers that are supported with NVIDIA AI Enterprise and the number of Ampere GPUs that are supported with each server model:

Table 2.      Supported PowerEdge servers and VxRail HCI appliances

These PowerEdge servers are NVIDIA-Certified Systems and have been proven through a rigorous suite of functional and performance tests. The test results confirm that these servers can deliver high performance both in single-node and networked multinode cluster training and inference benchmarks. Also, these servers are certified to be compatible with NVIDIA AI Enterprise through additional testing and validation.

The OpenManage portfolio simplifies the IT life cycle of PowerEdge servers from deployment to retirement.

Dell PowerScale storage

PowerScale storage helps unlock the structure within data and address the challenges of unstructured data management. PowerScale is the next evolution of OneFS—the operating system powering the scale-out NAS platform. The PowerScale family includes Dell Isilon nodes and PowerScale nodes, with PowerScale OneFS running across all of them. The software-defined architecture of OneFS provides simplicity at scale, intelligent insights, and the ability to have data anywhere it needs to be. Whether hosting file shares or home directories, or delivering high-performance data access for applications such as analytics, video rendering, and life sciences, PowerScale can seamlessly scale performance, capacity, and efficiency to handle any unstructured data workload. The new PowerScale all-flash platforms co-exist seamlessly in the same cluster with your existing Isilon nodes to drive your traditional and modern applications.

In this validated design, we use PowerScale as storage for the data lake—the data repository for unstructured data that you can use for neural network training. Isilon F800 All-Flash Scale-out NAS storage is ideal, delivering the analytics performance and extreme concurrency at scale to consistently feed the most data-hungry deep learning algorithms.

GPUDirect Storage, an NVIDIA technology, enables a direct data path between local or remote storage, like NVMe or NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF), and GPU memory. GPUDirect Storage avoids extra copies through a bounce buffer in the CPU’s memory. It enables a direct memory access (DMA) engine near the storage to move data on a direct path into or out of GPU memory – all without burdening the CPU or GPU. PowerScale supports GPUDirect Storage.

Dell PowerStore storage

PowerStore is a modern storage appliance designed for the data era. The single architecture of PowerStore for block, file, and VMware vVols uses the latest technologies to support an enterprise-class variety of traditional and modern workloads – from relational databases, to ERP and EMR applications, cloud native applications, and file-based workloads such as content repositories and home directories. The ability to accommodate application, multiprotocol network, and multiformat storage diversity (physical and virtual volumes, containers, and traditional files) in a single 2U appliance provides business-enabling flexibility and helps IT simplify and consolidate their infrastructure.

Administrators can choose to deploy PowerStoreOS in a bare-metal configuration directly on the PowerStore hardware or in a VM running on PowerStore’s optional integrated VMware hypervisor, providing yet another layer of isolation, intelligence, and abstraction.

Dell PowerSwitch switches

In this validated design, we use the following Dell switches:

• PowerSwitch S5232F-ON switch for 100 GbE network connectivity. Using the S5332F-ON switch, you can build a high-performance, cost-efficient data center leaf/spine fabric featuring 32 x 100 GbE QSFP28 ports. It supports Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) for zero-touch installation of network operating systems.
• PowerSwitch S5248F-ON switch for 25 GbE network connectivity. It features 48 x 25 GbE SFP28 ports, 4 x 100 GbE QSFP28 ports, and 2 x 100 GbE QFSP28-DD ports. It supports ONIE for zero-touch installation of network operating systems.
• PowerSwitch N3248TE-ON or PowerSwitch S4148T switch for 1 GbE out-of-band (OOB) connectivity.