Hammerspace, the company orchestrating the Next Data Cycle, is debuting Hyperscale NAS, a new, high-performance NAS architecture designed to handle today’s most advanced compute environments—including AI, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) projects. This latest category of storage architecture aims to deliver the speed and performance necessary to train AI models at scale and power GPU clusters of any size.
The continuous push for AI innovation is not without its costs. To build and train effective AI, these models have massive performance requirements on behalf of the GPU clusters processing the data. It’s further complicated by the dynamic nature of performance requirements, where AI needs are often a mix of a variety of processes.
Molly Presley, SVP of marketing at Hammerspace, explained that “enterprises are increasingly using large compute clusters to process unstructured data for AI, data analytics, and video rendering. These enterprises are finding that the NAS storage they put in place to store and protect data doesn’t have the performance capabilities to power the compute environments they are putting in place.”
With traditional scale-out NAS architectures failing to meet the performance and scale requirements needed by proprietary AI initiatives, Hammerspace launched the Hyperscale NAS architecture, combining model training efficacy with rapid time-to-market and time-to-insight to enable enterprises to “use the best of HPC technology without compromising enterprise standards,” according to David Flynn, founder and CEO of Hammerspace.
Hyperscale NAS—proven to be the fastest file system in the world for enterprise and web-scale AI training, according to Hammerspace—scales to meet the demands of any number of GPUs during training and inference phases. Benefitting from Hammerspace’s standards-based methodology, the Hyperscale NAS utilizes existing networks (Ethernet or InfiniBand) as well as existing enterprise standard hardware (such as COTS or existing third-party NAS storage).
“No other vendor working to accelerate NAS environments for the next data cycle powered by enterprise compute power is able to offer both a parallel file system presented as NAS nor able to offer their solution on any hardware and with any network,” said Presley. “We are the only NAS vendor that delivers an HPC parallel file system architecture as an Enterprise NAS…[meaning] that existing IT resources can benefit from the parallel file system performance previously only found with exotic HPC file systems that required proprietary client architectures.”
The Hammerspace Hyperscale NAS only requires one third of the networking ports and ½ of the storage nodes to deliver the same performance as scale-out NAS, due to the company’s parallel file system architecture. The new storage architecture also comes with a complete set of data services that allow enterprises to meet compliance, security, and data governance regulations.
Hyperscale NAS has completed the NVIDIA’s e GPUDirect Storage Support validation process, empowering organizations to use Hammerspace software in conjunction with NVIDIA technology. When Hammerspace is deployed in front of existing storage systems, any storage system can now be presented as GPUDirect Storage via Hammerspace, driving high throughput and low latency, according to the company.
“Many storage systems involve multiple layers of communication and data transfer. By embedding NFS directly into an Ethernet-attached SSD array, many of these layers are bypassed, resulting in significantly lower latency,” said Thomas Isakovich, CEO at Nimbus Data. “We are excited to work with Hammerspace as we partner to continue to deliver previously unmatched low latency and data path speed to high-performance applications.”
With Hammerspace Hyperscale NAS, “IT teams, infrastructure leaders, and CIOs can be the heroes of the day when building future-looking data architectures,” said Presley. “Instead of trying to work around the constraints of legacy storage architectures, they can design a solution that will meet the performance, cost, security, and simplicity requirements of enterprises, without compromise.”
To learn more about Hammerspace’s new Hyperscale NAS architecture, please visit https://hammerspace.com/.