Accelerate AI Adoption with VMware vSAN

Many business leaders are interested in adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce goods and services – a recent survey by the US Census Bureau found that while current adoption is low, many organizations are planning to adopt within the next six months ^(1). However, adopting AI isn’t easy – many organizations face significant challenges, such as the lack of expertise, clean training data, and sufficient hardware/software infrastructure. Within IT, the infrastructure challenges can be found at every tier – compute, storage and networking. VMware’s vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), offers a powerful remedy to these issues.

Overcoming AI Adoption Challenges

While expertise in AI will grow over time, the infrastructure obstacle persists. Effective AI adoption requires massive amounts of clean, filtered data and robust infrastructure to support data access, AI stack functionality, and GPU utilization. This is where vSAN ESA with VCF excels.

AI Storage Needs: The Critical Role of VMware vSAN

Training AI models involves reading large volumes of data in random order to train complex neural networks. This process demands high-performance, random read IO capabilities, and robust storage solutions. VMware vSAN ESA, provides the necessary performance and capacity to handle these intensive workloads.

Key Benefits of VMware vSAN for AI

Enhanced Performance with vSAN ESA:

VMware vSAN ESA leverages NVMe-based TLC SSDs and a new, log-structured file system to deliver consistent, high performance while also boosting efficiency. This results in faster, more efficient storage performance with greater consolidation ratios, supporting up to 500 VMs per host.

Scalable Storage with vSAN Max

A challenge for managing AI workload infrastructure is the inherent non-linear scaling; they typically rely on large data sets and require large amounts of compute resources. VMware vSAN Max offers a disaggregated storage solution, allowing for independent scaling of compute and storage to maximize efficiency. This configuration supports large-scale AI training and inferencing with improved throughput and lower latency by leveraging vSAN ESA.

Comprehensive AI Stack Integration:

VMware Cloud Foundation simplifies AI stack integration, offering full-stack alternatives like NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware Private AI Foundation. This ease of integration accelerates AI adoption and deployment.

Building infrastructure for AI workloads in your enterprise doesn’t have to be daunting. VMware vSAN ESA with VCF provides the infrastructure, performance, and flexibility needed to integrate AI seamlessly. By leveraging these technologies, you can overcome the common challenges of AI adoption and position your organization for future success.

Explore how vSAN can accelerate AI adoption and drive innovation in your enterprise. Read the full white paper VMware Cloud Foundation and vSAN Storage for Artificial Intelligence to dive deeper into the details and discover the transformative potential of vSAN ESA for AI storage with VCF.