NVIDIA Expands AI Infrastructure with New Storage Certification and Reference Architectures

Full Steam Ahead: NVIDIA-Certified Program Expands to Enterprise Storage for Faster AI Factory Deployment

New storage certification and reference architectures make it easy for enterprise IT to select and deploy AI infrastructure for optimal performance and efficiency. AI deployments thrive on speed, data and scale. That's why NVIDIA is expanding NVIDIA-Certified Systems to include enterprise storage certification -- for streamlined AI factory deployments in the enterprise with accelerated computing, networking, software and storage. As enterprises build AI factories, access to high-quality data is imperative to ensure optimal performance and reliability for AI models. The new NVIDIA-Certified Storage program announced today at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference validates that enterprise storage systems meet stringent performance and scalability data requirements for AI and high-performance computing workloads. Leading enterprise data platform and storage providers are already onboard, ensuring businesses have trusted options from day one. These include DDN, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, VAST Data and WEKA. Building Blocks for a New Class of Enterprise Infrastructure At GTC, NVIDIA also announced the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, a customizable reference design to build a new class of enterprise infrastructure for demanding agentic AI workloads. The NVIDIA-Certified Storage designation is a prerequisite for partners developing agentic AI infrastructure solutions built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform. Each of these NVIDIA-Certified Storage partners will deliver customized AI data platforms, in collaboration with NVIDIA, that can harness enterprise data to reason and respond to complex queries. NVIDIA-Certified was created more than four years ago as the industry's first certification program dedicated to tuning and optimizing AI systems to ensure optimal performance, manageability and scalability. Each NVIDIA-Certified system is rigorously tested and validated to deliver enterprise-grade AI performance. There are now 50+ partners providing 500+ NVIDIA-Certified systems, helping enterprises reduce time, cost and complexity by giving them a wide selection of performance-optimized systems to power their accelerated computing workloads. NVIDIA Enterprise Reference Architectures (RAs) were introduced last fall to provide partners with AI infrastructure best practices and configuration guidance for deploying NVIDIA-Certified servers, NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. Solutions based on NVIDIA Enterprise RAs are available from the world's leading systems providers to reduce the time, cost and complexity of enterprise AI deployments. Enterprise RAs are now available for a wide range of NVIDIA Hopper and NVIDIA Blackwell platforms, including NVIDIA HGX B200 systems and the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU. These NVIDIA technologies and partner solutions are the building blocks for enterprise AI factories, representing a new class of enterprise infrastructure for high-performance AI deployments at scale. Enterprise AI Needs Scalable Storage As the pace of AI innovation and adoption accelerates, secure and reliable access to high-quality enterprise data is becoming more important than ever. Data is the fuel for the AI factory. With enterprise data creation projected to reach 317 zettabytes annually by 2028*, AI workloads require storage architectures built to handle massive, unstructured and multimodal datasets. NVIDIA's expanded storage certification program is designed to meet this need and help enterprises build AI factories with a foundation of high-performance, reliable data storage solutions. The program includes performance testing as well as validation that partner storage systems adhere to design best practices, optimizing performance and scalability for enterprise AI workloads. NVIDIA-Certified Storage will be incorporated into NVIDIA Enterprise RAs, providing enterprise-grade data storage for AI factory deployments with full-stack solutions from global systems partners. Certified Storage for Every Deployment This certification builds on existing NVIDIA DGX systems and NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) storage programs, expanding the data ecosystem for AI infrastructure. These storage certification programs are aligned with their deployment models and architectures: With this framework, organizations of all sizes -- from cloud hyperscalers to enterprises -- can build AI factories that process massive amounts of data, train models faster and drive more accurate, reliable AI outcomes. Learn more about how NVIDIA-Certified Systems deliver seamless, high-speed performance and attend these related sessions at GTC: *Source: IDC, Worldwide IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2024-2028: AI Everywhere, But Upsurge in Data Will Take Time, doc #US52076424, May 2024

NVIDIA and Storage Industry Leaders Unveil New Class of Enterprise Infrastructure for the Age of AI

GTC -- NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, a customizable reference design that leading providers are using to build a new class of AI infrastructure for demanding AI inference workloads: enterprise storage platforms with AI query agents fueled by NVIDIA accelerated computing, networking and software. Using the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, NVIDIA-Certified Storage providers can build infrastructure to speed AI reasoning workloads with specialized AI query agents. These agents help businesses generate insights from data in near real time, using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software -- including NVIDIA NIM™ microservices for the new NVIDIA Llama Nemotron models with reasoning capabilities -- as well as the new NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprint. "Data is the raw material powering industries in the age of AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "With the world's storage leaders, we're building a new class of enterprise infrastructure that companies need to deploy and scale agentic AI across hybrid data centers." NVIDIA AI Data Platform Adds Accelerated Computing and AI to Storage The NVIDIA AI Data Platform brings accelerated computing and AI to the millions of businesses using enterprise storage for the data that drives their company. NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, BlueField DPUs and Spectrum-X networking provide an accelerated engine to speed AI query agent access to data stored on enterprise systems. BlueField DPUs deliver up to 1.6x higher performance than CPU-based storage while reducing power consumption by up to 50%, providing more than 3x higher performance per watt. Spectrum-X accelerates AI storage traffic up to 48% compared with traditional Ethernet by applying adaptive routing and congestion control. AI Data Platform storage infrastructure uses the NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprint for developing agentic systems that can reason and connect to enterprise data. AI-Q taps into NVIDIA NeMo Retriever™ microservices to accelerate data extraction and retrieval by up to 15x on NVIDIA GPUs. AI query agents built with the AI-Q Blueprint connect to data during inference to provide more accurate, context-aware responses. They can access large-scale data quickly and process various data types, including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, including text, PDF, images and video. Storage Industry Leaders Building AI Data Platforms With NVIDIA NVIDIA-Certified Storage partners are collaborating with NVIDIA to build custom AI data platforms. NVIDIA-Certified Storage providers are planning to offer solutions created with the NVIDIA AI Data platform starting this month.

12 AI-Focused Storage Offerings On Display At Nvidia GTC 2025

While some of the top storage vendors pledged support for the new Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design for AI infrastructure and AI inference, others introduce a wide range of hardware and software aimed at expanding the overall AI ecosystem. While the Nvidia GTC 2025 event this week is centered on what Nvidia is doing to build an AI ecosystem, including the introduction of its next-generation Blackwell Ultra GPU for AI data centers, it is also an opportunity for others in the industry to showcase what they bring to that ecosystem. One key part of building AI infrastructures is the storage industry. The GPUs needed to process AI training and inference are data-hungry, requiring not only ever more capacity to store that data but also performance to match their requirements. Therefore, it is no surprise that storage has become front and center at GTC 2025. [Related: DDN CEO On The Company's AI Mission And The 'Essential Role' Partners Play] Nvidia itself made storage news at the conference with the Tuesday introduction of the Nvidia AI Data Platform, a customizable reference design that many storage developers are using to build what Nvidia calls a "new class" of AI infrastructure for AI inference workloads. Leading storage vendors including DDN, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Vast Data, and Weka, are working with Nvidia to build infrastructures to speed AI workloads with specialized AI query agents to help businesses generate insights from data in near real time working with Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, Nvidia BlueField DPUs, and other technologies. Other storage vendors are also at the conference showing a wide range of hardware systems and components as well as software aimed at helping businesses take advantage of AI. CRN here presents information on the latest storage offerings from 12 vendors looking to help build high-capacity and/or high-performance systems aimed at making sure the data pipeline to AI moves as quickly as needed. Also look for CRN to examine how vendors outside the storage industry are helping build other parts of the AI infrastructure.

12 New AI-Focused Technologies For Nvidia AI Ecosystem At Nvidia GTC 2025

While the Nvidia GTC 2025 conference is centered on the advances Nvidia has made in GPUs, DPUs and other areas, it has evolved to be a top gathering to look at advances in AI and related technologies and so is the go-to for other vendors to show how they are advancing the AI ecosystem. This week's Nvidia GTC 2025 conference in San Jose, Calif., is the latest in an annual conference that started out as a way for Nvidia to highlight its tech prowess in GPUs and other technologies but is now a leading conference for AI in general. This is because not only does Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang bring some of the biggest names in the IT industry to share his keynotes to discuss their AI initiatives and their partnerships with his company, but also because of the large number of companies that bring their latest AI-related offerings to booths in the sprawling solution pavilion. These vendors run the gamut from the largest server, storage, networking and AI PC companies to small storage startups, all of which hope to catch the attention of solution providers and businesses looking to learn how they can transform their business to take advantage of AI. [Related: Cisco, Nvidia Partner On Joint Architecture For The Creation Of AI Data Centers] The offerings include Dell AI Factory with Nvidia advances, HPE Private Cloud AI, Supermicro rack-scale offerings built on Nvidia's HGX B200 and AI servers from MSI. Other companies like Vultr, Anaconda, Penguin Solutions, DeepTempo, illumex, Balbix, DataStax, H2O.ai and DataRobot introduced a variety of hardware and software technologies for advancing AI. Storage vendors had a major presence at Nvidia GTC 2025 too, including Graid Technology, Kioxia, Pure Storage, Cohesity, IBM, DDN, Hitachi Vantara, Pliops, MinIO, NetApp, Vast Data and Solidigm were there showing their latest AI-focused hardware and software. CRN also has highlighted new storage offerings from GTC 2025. Here's a look at some of the hottest AI-focused products taking the spotlight at the GTC 2025.