Dell unveils AI Data Platform upgrades with NVIDIA & Elastic

Dell Technologies has announced enhancements to the Dell AI Data Platform, expanding its support across the full lifecycle of artificial intelligence workloads with new hardware and software collaborations.

The updates to the Dell AI Data Platform aim to address the challenges enterprises face with massive, rapidly growing, and unstructured data pools. Much of this data is unsuitable for generative AI applications unless it can be properly indexed and retrieved in real time. The latest advancements are designed to streamline data ingestion, transformation, retrieval, and computing tasks within enterprise environments.

Lifecycle management

The Dell AI Data Platform now provides improved automation for data preparation, enabling enterprises to move more quickly from experimental phases to deployment in production environments. The architecture is anchored by specialised storage and data engines, designed to connect AI agents directly to quality enterprise data for analytics and inferencing.

The platform incorporates the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference architecture, providing a validated, GPU-accelerated solution that combines storage, compute, networking, and AI software for generative AI workflows.

New partnerships

An important component of the update is the introduction of an unstructured data engine, the result of collaboration with Elastic. This engine offers customers advanced vector search, semantic retrieval, and hybrid keyword search capabilities, underpinned by built-in GPU acceleration for improved inferencing and analytics performance.

The unstructured data engine operates alongside other data tools, including a federated SQL engine for querying structured data, a large-scale processing engine for data transformation, and fast-access AI-ready storage. The array of tools is designed to turn large, disparate datasets into actionable insights for AI applications.

Server integration

Supporting these software advancements are the new Dell PowerEdge R7725 and R770 servers, fitted with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. Dell claims these air-cooled servers provide improved price-to-performance for enterprise AI workloads, supporting a diverse range of use cases from data analytics and visual computing to AI inferencing and simulation.

The NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU supports up to six times the token throughput for large language model inference, offers double the capacity for engineering simulations, and can handle four times the number of concurrent users compared to the previous generation. The integration of these GPUs in a 2U server chassis is positioned to make high-density AI calculations more accessible to a wider base of enterprise users.

The Dell PowerEdge R7725 will be the first 2U server platform to deliver the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, allowing organisations to deploy a unified hardware and software solution without the need for in-house architecture and testing. This is expected to enable enterprises to accelerate inferencing, achieve more responsive semantic searching, and support larger and more complex AI operations.

Industry perspectives

"The key to unlocking AI's full potential lies in breaking down silos and simplifying access to enterprise data," said Arthur Lewis, president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. "Collaborating with industry leaders like NVIDIA and Elastic to advance the Dell AI Data Platform will help organisations accelerate innovation and scale AI with confidence."

Justin Boitano, Vice President of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA, added, "Enterprises worldwide need infrastructure that handles the growing scale and complexity of AI workloads. With NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs in new 2U Dell PowerEdge servers, organisations now have a power efficient, accelerated computing platform to power AI applications and storage on NVIDIA Blackwell."

Ken Exner, Chief Product Officer at Elastic, commented, "Fast, accurate, and context-aware access to unstructured data is key to scaling enterprise AI. With Elasticsearch vector database at the heart of the Dell AI Data Platform's unstructured data engine, Elastic will bring vector search and hybrid retrieval to a turnkey architecture, enabling natural language search, real-time inferencing, and intelligent asset discovery across massive datasets. Dell's deep presence in the enterprise makes them a natural partner as we work to help customers deploy AI that's performant, precise, and production-ready."

Availability

The unstructured data engine for the Dell AI Data Platform is scheduled for availability later in the year. The Dell PowerEdge R7725 and R770 servers with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs will also become globally available in the same period.