Hitachi Vantara is making Nvidia’s HGX part of its IQ GenAI infrastructure range.
The main storage system suppliers are all scrambling to provide customers with reference architecture-type frameworks that place their storage inside a GenAI inferencing system, typically including Nvidia GPUs, NIM And MeMo retriever microservices, some Kubernetes orchestration, and large language model (LLM) sources such as Hugging Face. Pure Storage’s GenAI Pod, WEKA’s WARRP, and Hitachi iQ are three examples.
Jason Hardy, Hitachi Vantara’s CTO for AI, said: “The Hitachi iQ offering with Nvidia HGX is the latest example of how we are at the forefront of AI innovation. As one of the only vendors to offer a complete, end-to-end AI infrastructure solution, we marry world-class technology with deep industry expertise for a powerful, one-stop-shop experience.”
Nvidia DGX offerings are fixed and integrated GPU systems supported directly by Nvidia. Its HGX products are modular building blocks for OEMs to use when building their GPU servers, with tailored features such as the number of GPUs, CPU types, memory, storage, and networking components to meet their own requirements.
Hitachi Vantara quotes ESG research finding that 97 percent of organizations view GenAI as a top-five priority, which explains the popularity of storage suppliers wrapping GenAI frameworks around their products. Its Hitachi iQ offering with Nvidia HGX combines storage, networking, servers with Nvidia H100 and H200 Tensor Core GPU options, and the Nvidia AI Enterprise end-to-end, cloud-native software platform – including NIM and NeMo – for the development and deployment of GenAI applications.
The storage element is the Hitachi Content Software for File (HCFS) platform, based on the WEKA Data Platform, with integrated object storage. Using this provides “a zero-copy architecture that eliminates wasteful data copying and transfer times between storage silos for different phases of AI.”
Hitachi iQ also features AMD EPYC processors, PCIe Gen 5 E3.S NVMe SSDs, high-performance networking with Nvidia ConnectX-7 400 Gbps InfiniBand or Ethernet NICs.
Hitachi iQ with the Nvidia HGX platform and Hitachi Content Software for File are now available globally. There is more information about Hitachi iQ here.
