Hot on the heels of rival NetApp Inc. introducing a new hardware platform for artificial intelligence workloads, Dell EMC today unveiled two competing offerings that target the same market.

The products are rolling out under the brand Ready Solutions for AI. According to Dell EMC, they’re prevalidated designs that bring together different hardware and software components to save companies the trouble of cobbling together an AI environment on their own.

The first of the offerings targets machine learning, the most basic form of AI. It’s based on Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R640 and R740xd rack servers, which can each be equipped with up to two Intel Xeon Scalable central processing units.

Dell EMC has paired the machines with several software tools for running machine learning models. They include Cloudera Inc.’s Data Science Workbench and Apache Spark, a popular open-source analytics engine with a number of AI capabilities. The company has also mixed in its own Data Science Provisioning Engine, a tool designed to ease the deployment of Intel Corp.’s BigDL AI extension for Spark.

Dell EMC’s other new Ready Solution is focused on deep learning, the more versatile and computationally intensive subset of machine learning. The company’s choice of hardware for the offering reflects the demanding nature of the use cases it’s targeting.

At the core of the solution is the R740xd rack server and the C4140, a machine from a separate line within the PowerEdge family that can house up to four Nvidia Corp. Tesla V100 graphics processing units. GPUs are highly adept at running AI workloads thanks to their high core count compared with CPUs. The solution combines the servers with Dell EMC’s Isilon F800 network-attached flash storage system and partner Bright Computing Inc.’s Cluster Manager for Data Science.

The new offerings will boost Dell EMC’s efforts to target the fast-growing AI market. In today’s announcement, it cited research from parent company Dell Technologies Inc. that found 80 percent of companies plan to invest in “advanced AI technologies” within the next five years.

Dell EMC singled out the deep learning solution as particularly well-equipped to address this demand. It said that the platform can provide up to 2.7 times the performance of comparable gear from NetApp and up to 2.3 times more than Pure Storage Inc.’s AIRI system, which uses V100 GPUs as well.

Photo: Dell