SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 31, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BlueData , provider of the leading Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) software platform, today announced a new solution to accelerate deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) applications in the enterprise. The BlueData AI / ML Accelerator solution includes the software and professional services to deploy containerized multi-node sandbox environments for exploratory use cases with TensorFlow and other ML / DL tools.
The promise of AI has been around for several decades, but it was only recently that AI started to become more widely adopted in the enterprise. Now AI is being explored and implemented for digital transformation initiatives in nearly every industry – leveraging innovative new open source tools and algorithms for ML / DL, the immense volumes of data available, and advances in high-performance data processing infrastructure.
In fact, AI and ML / DL have moved into the mainstream with a broad range of data-driven enterprise applications: credit card fraud detection, stock market prediction for financial trading, credit risk modeling for insurance, genomics and precision medicine, disease detection and diagnosis, natural language processing (NLP) for customer service, autonomous driving and connected car IoT use cases, and more.
One of the most popular ML / DL tools is TensorFlow, often used together with technologies like Python and GPUs to create an end-to-end pipeline from data preparation to modeling, scoring, and inference. However, there are many other open source and commercial tools that may be used depending on the use case. Data scientists and developers want to evaluate and work with a variety of ML / DL tools, and they need rapid prototyping to compare different libraries and techniques. In most large organizations, they also need to comply with enterprise security, network, storage, user authentication, and access policies.
These users often start with a single-node environment; but these technologies are difficult to implement in multi-node distributed environments for large-scale enterprise use cases. It’s a complex software stack, requiring version compatibility and integration across many different components. And most enterprises lack the skills to deploy and configure these tools with their existing data infrastructure and systems – whether on-premises, in the public cloud, using CPUs and/or GPUs, with a data lake or with cloud storage.
The new BlueData AI / ML Accelerator provides a turnkey solution to address these challenges, including:
- Rapid deployment of containerized multi-node sandbox environments for AI / ML / DL use cases, using the BlueData’s EPIC software platform .
- Ready-to-run Docker images of popular ML / DL tools (including TensorFlow, SparkMLlib, H2O, Caffe2, Anaconda, and BigDL) for use in large-scale distributed computing environments.
- The ability to spin up new ML / DL environments in a matter of minutes via self-service, with REST APIs or a few mouse clicks in a web UI.
- Secure integration with distributed file systems including HDFS, NFS, and S3 for storing data and ML / DL models.
- Automated and reproducible provisioning, enabling on-demand creation of identical ML / DL environments and reproducible results.
- Professional services, training, and support to accelerate AI initiatives and deliver business outcomes with ML / DL.
Now enterprises can get up and running quickly with distributed ML / DL applications in multi-node containerized environments – on any infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the cloud, using either CPUs and/or GPUs. Fully-configured environments can be provisioned in minutes, with self-service and automation. Data scientists and developers can rapidly build prototypes, experiment, and iterate with their preferred ML / DL tools for faster time-to-value. And their IT teams can ensure enterprise-grade security, data protection, and performance – with elasticity, flexibility, and scalability in a multi-tenant architecture. The new turnkey solution is designed for out-of-the-box deployments with open source technologies including TensorFlow, SparkMLlib, H2O, Caffe2, Anaconda, and BigDL. However, it can be easily configured and extended for use with other ML / DL technologies – including both open source tools as well as commercial applications. And while initial implementations may focus on prototypes and pre-production environments, the solution is extensible to large-scale AI / ML / DL production deployments.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are on just about every enterprise’s roadmap for digital transformation. The potential value and impact of these new technologies is transformational, but it’s difficult to implement and configure these tools for large-scale distributed applications,” said Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and CEO of BlueData. “Many of our customers have seen the benefits of running their machine learning and deep learning applications on the BlueData platform, and we’ve seen overwhelming demand from other enterprises looking to do the same. This new solution provides their data science teams with on-demand access to multi-node sandbox environments for exploring AI and ML use cases, without all the operational overhead and deployment complexity.”
The BlueData AI / ML Accelerator includes a one-year subscription for BlueData EPIC software along with professional services, training, and support to assist in customers’ AI and ML / DL deployments.
Supporting resources
- Solution brief: BlueData AI / Machine Learning Accelerator
- Blog post: Deploying Machine Learning Pipelines for AI Use Cases
- On-demand webinar: Deep Learning with TensorFlow and Spark: Using GPUs and Docker Containers
About BlueData Software, Inc. BlueData is transforming how enterprises deploy Big Data analytics and machine learning. The BlueData EPIC™ software platform uses Docker container technology to make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective for enterprises to innovate with Big Data and AI technologies – enabling Big-Data-as-a-Service either on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid architecture. With BlueData, they can spin up containerized environments within minutes, providing data scientists with on-demand access to the applications, data, and infrastructure they need. Based in Santa Clara, California, BlueData was founded by VMware veterans and its investors including Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Dell Technologies Capital, Ignition Partners, and Intel Capital. To learn more about BlueData, visit www.bluedata.com or follow @bluedata .
Press Contact Jordan Tewell 10Fold 415.800.5385 bluedata@10Fold.com
