A³I Datasheet

DDN A³I® Storage Platforms

DDN’s A³I (Accelerated, Any-Scale AI) solutions break new ground for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL), providing unmatched flexibility for your organization’s AI needs.

Engineered from the ground-up for the AI-enabled data center, A³I solutions are optimized for ingest, training, data transformations, replication, metadata and small data transfers.

DDN offers flexibility in platform choice with the all-flash NVMe AI400X2, a hybrid flash and hard drive storage platform which leverages parallel access to flash and deeply expandable HDD storage. The AI400X2 supports a scale-out model with solutions starting at a few TBs yet scalable to 10s of PBs.

Fully Integrated, GPU-Optimized Data Platforms

Easy to deploy, A³I solutions are turn-key, pre-configured, and provide the most
capable scale-out platform for capacity and performance.

Full GPU Saturation

Fully optimized for all types of I/O patterns and data layouts, A³I solutions deliver data to applications, ensuring full GPU resource utilization even with distributed applications running on multiple computing servers. Performance testing on the DDN A3I architecture has been conducted with all widely-used DL frameworks (TensorFlow, Horovod, Torch, PyTorch, NVIDIA® TensorRT™, Caffe, Caffe2, CNTK, MXNET and Theano). Using the A³I intelligent client, containerized applications can engage the full capabilities of the data infrastructure, and that the AI servers achieves full GPU saturation consistently for DL workloads.

Capacity-Efficient AI Storage

A³I solutions provide flexible capacity expansion options, with up to 500TB of scale-out NVMe capacity per AI400X2 appliance.

Highest Resiliency, Reliability and Security at Scale

Engineered to provide the highest data availability and maximum system uptime, all A³I hardware and software components are integrated as a fully redundant system.

Unified Namespace

A³I solutions allow for consolidation of hot training data and warm expanding data libraries into a single platform, providing easy data access from a unified interface.

Multi-Tenancy and Quota Support

A³I solutions can be secured on a per-tenant basis that ensure users and applications can only access the data that they’re entitled to. Advanced quota controls provide easy management of file system consumption at the user, group, and project level.

Technical Specifications

System Features

• High performance GPU-optimized parallel file system
• Sequential read performance up to 90GB/s
• Sequential write performance up to 65GB/s
• Up to 3M IOPs per appliance

Controller Host Ports Per Appliance

• 8x 200G HDR InfiniBand or 200 GbE ports

Drive Support

• 2.5” dual port NVMe drives
• 30TB, 60TB, 120TB, 250TB, 500TB useable capacity configurations

Standard Software Features

• High performance parallel file system, LUN mapping and masking, intelligent write striping, read QoS, port zoning detection, data integrity check/correction, interface options (SSH to CLI, web-based GUI, Python API), state change messages (via e-mail, SNMP trap and syslog).

Safety

• Agency Certifications Ul, cUl, CE, FC