DDN Launches EXA5 for AI, Big Data, HPC Workloads

DDN, for two decades competing at the headwaters of high performance storage, this morning announced an enterprise-oriented end-to-end high performance storage and data management for AI, big data and HPC acceleration. In so doing, the company said it’s bringing to the burgeoning enterprise market for AI some of the transferable capabilities with an emphasis on small file speed-ups required in AI workloads that the company has developed for HPC.Launched here at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, EXA5 is the newest version of DDN’s EXAscaler Storage, designed to make the EXAscaler infrastructure easier to consume by offering what the company said are deeper integrations into AI and HPC ecosystems through simpler implementation and scaling models, visibility into workflows and global data management features.DDN said EXA5 allows for scaling either with flash or with a hybrid approach “offering flexible scaling according to needs with the performance of flash or the economics of HDDs.” EXA5 is compatible with DDN’s AI pre-configured A3I storage appliances, reducing deployment time, the company said. Together they provide benchmarking, documentation and qualification with AI and GPU environments.“We’re looking to eliminate some of that sprawl going on at the back end,” Kurt Kuckein, DDN director of marketing, told us. “Data lakes and distributed types of architectures with tightly coupled compute and storage are not able to drive the performance needed, and some archived solutions out there are too deep to be accessible. So what we’ve done is deliver exceptional performance while managing the cost profile, whether it’s cost per gigabyte served or cost per gigabyte stored on the back end.”DDN’s objective, Kuckein said, is coupling best-in-class technologies, “extracting the ultimate value out of emergent architectures. “We hear about organizations frustrated, for example, by high end NVME systems, you put a file system in front of it and the performance would be cut in half.”EXA5 features and capabilities include:Strategem is DDN’s integrated policy engine for flash tiering with data management capabilities that DDN said enables users to manage most active data to scale-out flash tiers from scale-out hard disc drive (HDD) tiers. It also controls free space on flash, responding to changing demands and scanning storage devices directly to find target files.

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Airbyte Racks Up Awards from InfoWorld, BigDATAwire, Built In; Builds Largest and Fastest-Growing User Community

Airbyte | January 30, 2024

Airbyte, creators of the leading open-source data movement infrastructure, today announced a series of accomplishments and awards reinforcing its standing as the largest and fastest-growing data movement community. With a focus on innovation, community engagement, and performance enhancement, Airbyte continues to revolutionize the way data is handled and processed across industries. “Airbyte proudly stands as the front-runner in the data movement landscape with the largest community of more than 5,000 daily users and over 125,000 deployments, with monthly data synchronizations of over 2 petabytes,” said Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO, Airbyte. “This unparalleled growth is a testament to Airbyte's widespread adoption by users and the trust placed in its capabilities.” The Airbyte community has more than 800 code contributors and 12,000 stars on GitHub. Recently, the company held its second annual virtual conference called move(data), which attracted over 5,000 attendees. Airbyte was named an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award finalist: Data Management – Integration (in October) for cutting-edge products that are changing how IT organizations work and how companies do business. And, at the start of this year, was named to the Built In 2024 Best Places To Work Award in San Francisco – Best Startups to Work For, recognizing the company's commitment to fostering a positive work environment, remote and flexible work opportunities, and programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, the company received the BigDATAwire Readers/Editors Choice Award – Big Data and AI Startup, which recognizes companies and products that have made a difference. Other key milestones in 2023 include the following. Availability of more than 350 data connectors, making Airbyte the platform with the most connectors in the industry. The company aims to increase that to 500 high-quality connectors supported by the end of this year. More than 2,000 custom connectors were created with the Airbyte No-Code Connector Builder, which enables data connectors to be made in minutes. Significant performance improvement with database replication speed increased by 10 times to support larger datasets. Added support for five vector databases, in addition to unstructured data sources, as the first company to build a bridge between data movement platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). Looking ahead, Airbyte will introduce data lakehouse destinations, as well as a new Publish feature to push data to API destinations. About Airbyte Airbyte is the open-source data movement infrastructure leader running in the safety of your cloud and syncing data from applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses, lakes, and other destinations. Airbyte offers four products: Airbyte Open Source, Airbyte Self-Managed, Airbyte Cloud, and Powered by Airbyte. Airbyte was co-founded by Michel Tricot (former director of engineering and head of integrations at Liveramp and RideOS) and John Lafleur (serial entrepreneur of dev tools and B2B). The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a distributed team around the world. To learn more, visit airbyte.com.

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