It may have been founded in the Middle Ages, but the University of Pisa is getting a head start on the digital revolution.

The University recently announced that it selected Dell Technologies Inc. to assist it in its journey to modernize its infrastructure to meet demands for remote learning. Endowed with its own private fiber network, the school is attended by over 50,000 students scattered around the city, making the task of full digital integration an expensive and logistical challenge.

To handle this high demand for accurate data processing and performance, the university employed Dell EMC PowerMax, an all-flash enterprise data storage solution.

“It was not migration but the integration of the PowerScale or flash machine inside our environment,” said Maurizio Davini (pictured, left), chief technology officer of the University of Pisa.

The server’s use of nonvolatile memory express specification for high-speed communication between processor and storage “is a key factor for the storage support. We already have experienced some of the NVMe possibilities on the PowerMax, but flash is the minimum and NVMe is what we need to support in the right way the [artificial intelligence] workloads,” Davini added.

Davini and Kaushik Ghosh (pictured, right), director of product management at Dell, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a special CUBE Conversation. They discussed the University of Pisa’s new digital integration, using artificial intelligence to assist migration, Dell’s new PowerScale solution and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Artificial intelligence sets a path for simpler integration

AI is one of the university’s key factors in migrating to an all-flash environment.

“The data sets with artificial intelligence have grown significantly, and not only has the data has become larger, but the AI models that are used have also become more complex,” Ghosh said. “For example, one of the studies suggests that for a modeling of natural language processing, the number of parameters used could exceed a trillion in a few years.”

AI and deep learning demand workhorse setups that Dell is equipped to supply, according to Ghosh.

“For artificial intelligence workloads, you need these GPU-capable machines, and PowerScale supports those high-performance GPU-direct machines through the different technologies that we offer,” he said. “The PowerScale F900 … is our best highest performance all-flash and the most economical all-flash to date.”

On top of being the fastest, the F900 offers the most economical data storage as well, which is ideal for high-performance workloads, according to Ghosh.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE