While attending the VAST Launch event in San Jose, CA, recently, Brian was able to catch up with Rob Davis who is President of Storage Technology at the Nvidia Networking BU where he focuses on ways to apply high-speed interface technology to storage systems.

Prior to becoming a part of NVIDIA Rob served as VP of Storage Technology at Mellanox Technologies. Rob is currently leading the development and marketing for products focused on NVMe over fabrics, which will allow for the high-speed networking of PCIe-based storage. NVIDIA is a VAST Data partner and is a supplier of products for the recently announced VAST Data Ceres platform.

Rob and Brian covered a number of technologies relating to NVIDIA and how they fit into the VAST Data architecture. With data storage and retrieval a huge topic today, much of the conversation focused on DPUs. Rob also brought up NVIDIA converged accelerators, a product that combines the power of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture with the enhanced security and networking capabilities of the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU. This advanced architecture delivers unprecedented performance and strong security for AI-powered workloads in edge computing, telecommunications, and network security.

If you are interested in how NVIDIA is working with VAST Data to deliver Ceres, this is a great place to land. The related discussions around BlueField-2 DPU and converged accelerators, and how technologies are trying to catch up with the demands from data storage and retrieval.

It is a short podcast, but if you want to skip around, the timestamps are below.

00:00  Brian intro from VAST Data in San Jose

DPU Progression Summary

How the DPU fits with the GPU

Technology is catching up

DGX Server

05:00  Impact of cooling demands

Supermicro servers

Liquid cooling and other partners are doing

Data evolution

AI is driving data retention

Autonomous Autos

10:00  Data ingestion

Analytics plays an important role

Transferring data

Keeping GPUs busy

15:00  Importance of the DPU

Storage acceleration

JBOF discussion

CPU usage becomes minimalized

Intro to VAST technology

BlueField-2

20:00  NVMe

BlueField-2 Technology

VAST technologies associated with the DPU

VAST servers utilizing smaller form factor hardware

Power requirements are reduced

25:00  RDMA functions

GDS

Efficiencies in design

VAST driving storage disruption

30:00  Array growth driving technologies

NVMe

Flash

NAND

Rob's focus at NVIDIA

New products

Converged Accelerator

Computational storage

How it works

35:00  History

IBM Shark (humor)

Security

Encryption

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