Dell EMC and NVIDIA Announce General Availability of Isilon with NVIDIA DGX-1 Reference Architecture Solution Through EMEA Partners


Today, Dell EMC Isilon and NVIDIA’s joint reference architecture is now commercially available in EMEA as an integrated turnkey AI solution sold through our joint strategic channel partners. Pairing Dell EMC’s scale-out All-Flash Isilon F800 with the NVIDIA DGX-1 system, this solution simplifies and accelerates AI deployments with a jointly validated reference architecture. This architecture complements the Dell EMC Ready Solutions that leverage the powerful NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs inside the Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140, DSS8440 and PowerEdge R940 servers to offer customers unparalleled design flexibility to meet their AI computing needs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents the 4th revolutionary technology epoch and promises to improve humanity while delivering unparalleled business success for those that can harness it. The winners and losers in the Age of AI will be separated by organizations who recognize that data is now a capital asset (we call that Data Capital) and can quickly and efficiently harvest their data capital with analytics. AI is the pinnacle of analytics and will allow organizations to extract the maximum value from their data to differentiate products, enhance services and create new revenue streams.

Gartner is predicting US $3.9 trillion in AI-generated revenue by 2022.[1] According to McKinsey, by 2030, AI “could potentially deliver additional global economic activity of around US $13 trillion,” with early AI adopters standing to achieve up to 20-25 percent more of the economic benefits than others.[2] To put this into perspective, this means that by 2030, AI’s impact could be larger than today’s cumulative worldwide GDP.

AI adoption is set to accelerate dramatically, with 37 percent of companies already investing in AI and 85 percent of companies saying they plan to do so in the next three years.[2] In anticipation of the deluge of new deep learning and machine learning use cases, Dell EMC and NVIDIA have spent years collaborating through a joint OEM partnership, to offer multiple AI solutions exclusively through our channel partners that offer flexibility and informed choice. What started with graphics acceleration for Dell PCs and workstations quickly evolved into NVIDIA GPU-accelerated servers, like the ultra-dense Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 and the DSS 8440 servers to speed up AI workloads.

As these solutions matured and became more data intensive, our partnership evolved to production-grade platforms like the Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI. This Ready Solution pairs the Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 with NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs with Dell EMC Isilon’s high performance All-Flash scale-out storage and networking to eliminate I/O bottlenecks to fuel deeper AI insights at scale. The natural progression from here was to get out ahead of the rapidly changing AI analytics toolkits such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, which are constantly optimizing their analytics to take advantage of the parallelism of large multi-socket servers and multi-server configuration. To address the growing need for computing power, Dell EMC and NVIDIA validated the DSS8440 on NVIDIA’s open source RAPIDS framework, delivering industry-leading performance numbers. In addition, customers can leverage Isilon storage with their Data Science Workstation, providing a seamless compute and storage experience from desktop to data center. Finally, Dell EMC and NVIDIA launched of the reference architecture with Isilon All-Flash and the NVIDIA DGX-1.

These new turnkey AI platforms will enable rapid deployment of production-grade deep learning solutions for use cases such as genomics, precision medicine, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD), video analytics and content enrichment, fraud detection/prevention and a multitude of other AI workloads, where an 8-way or 16-way high-speed GPU interconnect architecture is demanded by the AI workload. This scale-out offering independently scales compute and storage allowing customers the flexibility to optimize the balance among price, performance and data footprint to meet your needs. Additionally, the validated solution stacks will allow these strategic channel partners to offer value-added innovation to further accelerate end-user application development and vertical use case realization for deep learning and AI solutions. Combined with the recent global launch of NVIDIA’s DGX-Ready Data Center program, these platforms offer customers the ultimate flexibility to address their AI needs no matter where they may be.

We have best-in-class partners in EMEA with specialized expertise in architecting, deploying and supporting modern infrastructure for AI and data-intensive workloads, who also see this as an opportunity for customers:

“BeanTech is excited to be working with Dell EMC and NVIDIA to deliver the turnkey solution by combining NVIDIA’s DGX-1 high-performance AI system with Dell EMC’s All-Flash Isilon F800 storage, in a partnership where our expertise delivering solutions for artificial intelligence and deep learning workloads finds the perfect answer to the request of having a scalable high-performance compute and storage platform, simplifying and accelerating data management for business and research innovation.”

– Luca Degano, VP of Sales & Marketing, beanTech

“At it-RSC, we are able to develop and provide ‘pluggable’ AI infrastructure and solutions based on NVIDIA DGX systems and Dell EMC Isilon technology. Because of our expertise in AI we, as a DELL EMC OEM partner, refine the existing technology to meet our customers’ training, inference and ‘going-to production’ approaches. That is what vCAX-X is capable of. v-vCAX is not just a trademark, a slogan or an easily remembered logo. It is a studiously crafted platform to make AI implementations easy. AI is no longer limited by where or how data is created. AI will now be where you are.”

– Thorsten Wujek, Chief Technology Officer, it-RSC, vCAX-X platform

“AI places unprecedented demands on data center compute, storage, networking and facilities. IT leaders need an infrastructure strategy that accelerates AI, instead of stalling it. With today’s announcement, we’re expanding the reach of our reference architecture solution built on NVIDIA DGX and Isilon, delivering a faster, simpler, proven approach for deploying AI at scale.”

– Charlie Boyle, vice president and general manager of DGX systems at NVIDIA

These best-in-class partners share our excitement because they understand the needs of their customers and they see clear demand for high performance AI solutions and deep learning platforms.

Together, these technologies provide the foundation for successful AI solutions which drive the development of advanced deep learning software frameworks for modern AI needs. NVIDIA delivers massively parallel compute and full-stack AI software innovation for accelerated model training, bringing new insights to data in near real time. When combined with the Isilon’s OneFS file system to support the concurrency, performance and petabyte scale of unstructured data sets, this solution turns AI possibility into AI reality.

As we continue to innovate and make AI simpler to consume, we look forward to future announcements regarding the extended worldwide availability of our joint Dell EMC-NVIDIA turnkey solution.

Learn more about the Dell EMC Isilon with NVIDIA DGX solution by visiting

[1] Gartner press release: April 2018

[2] McKinsey Global Institute. Notes from the AI Frontier: Modeling the Impact of AI on the World Economy

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