Olympus uses Pure Storage solutions for its full-scale container-based AI development platform

2021: Using Pure Storage AIRI

On September 7, 2021, Pure Storage, which provides storage as-a-service in the multi-cloud world, announced that Olympus, a global supplier of endoscopes and other medical devices, has chosen AIRI, the Pure reference architecture for AI (artificial intelligence), in order to accelerate the development of AI technologies in the company.

AIRI - An AI infrastructure designed with Pure Storage FlashBlade and Nvidia DGX-1 Systems provides Olympus with the speed, scalability, and flexibility needed to continuously develop and deploy high-performance data-intensive applications. The unified file and block storage FlashBlade stores hundreds of terabytes of data, including snapshots and other data, that are transferred to artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) models in order to improve the accuracy of the output.

In addition to the implementation of AIRI, Olympus also provided the ability to provide storage systems for container environments on demand. Proactive support for Pure has enabled Olympus to launch a platform and environment for container-based AI development, and has contributed to more efficient use of resources in general. This approach has increased the speed of creating an AI development environment, giving developers the ability to self-service. In addition, Pure's FlashBlade and Evergreen Storage solutions provided the company with a significant advantage by supporting rapid upgrades without downtime. Now developers don't need to manage resources in the AI development environment.

AI-related research and development generates a large amount of image data, and the infrastructure for storing it plays a very important role. In addition, as the number of directions for AI development increases, an environment that efficiently uses GPU resources becomes necessary. Therefore, preparing a flexible environment for the development of AI that solves these problems was not an easy task for us, "said Shuta Yanagita, software strategy manager at Olympus.

At Olympus, the amount of data processed during AI development is constantly growing, and storage capacity is expected to increase in the future. It is also discussed that the use of data by AI developers will increase in the future.

AI-based innovations in healthcare have tremendous potential. We are pleased that Olympus is using AIRI to develop medicine and help doctors around the world, "said Yoshiyuki Tanaka, president of Pure Storage in Japan.

Using Pure's capabilities, Olympus has been able to reduce the time it takes to develop and market solutions. With the integration of AIRI and Red Hat OpenShift developers can quickly deploy a development environment and simplify storage delivery for container-based applications with Red Hat OpenShift. This helps Olympus run applications faster and explore almost limitless opportunities to solve global health problems.