Pure and Nvidia working together

This is from a press release today (slightly edited by me for simplicity)

Pure Storage, the all-flash storage platform that helps innovators build a better world with data, today announced the first comprehensive AI-Ready Infrastructure, (AIRI), powered by NVIDIA.

Developed by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI is purpose-built to enable data architects, scientists and business leaders to extend the power of the NVIDIA DGX-1 and put AI-at-scale into operation for every enterprise. With AIRI, cloud, enterprise and government organizations can accelerate time-to-insight and bring new, impactful innovations to humanity, faster.

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I was just coming here to post about this…but it seems the original press release has been removed for now. I think the NVidia conference is going on this week, so that almost makes me think maybe the press release jumped the gun.

This link looks to have tried to summarize the release.
http://nicebot.co/news/2018/03/27/announcing-airi-industrys-…

Here is three different places it appears the link has since been removed (as of just after 8 am):
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/announcing-airi-ind…

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/announcing-airi-ind…

http://virtual-strategy.com/2018/03/27/announcing-airi-indus…

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Ironically enough, I actually just started questioning my Pure Storage allocation yesterday after the market closed. I even put in a limit order after hours to lighten my position, but canceled it after it didn’t fill at the closing price. Seeing this announcement now, I’ll be sticking with my present shares that make up about a 6% position.

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With this news seemingly coming out early (but some of us having been able to notice it) and seeing Saul’s other post about Oppenheimer (http://discussion.fool.com/more-on-pure-storage-33024060.aspx) updating their view on Pure Storage…I took the liberty of purchasing some April 20th $22.50 call options right at the open this morning.

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Here’s a good link for the Press Release:
https://investor.purestorage.com/news-and-events/press-relea…

more on DGX-1, which is basically a GPU-enhanced server:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-1/

Only specific partners/vendors are set up to resell the DGX-1:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/where-to-buy-dgx-sy…

Similarly there is the HGX, and these are partnered up with:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/hgx-1/
(Read the list above if you don’t think NVIDIA has skin in the game for China - this is a good thing, imo)
See also this link for the China connection:
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/china-s-top-server-builde…

HGX is the hyperscale (think: public cloud) version of DGX (more on-prem).

I am aware of at least one giant healthcare company looking at these solutions.

It is all cool stuff, but it takes a couple years before larger Enterprise companies move from tinkering with a product in a test environment vs putting it into live production. These products have been around for a couple years now and are predictably now seeing more and more traction.

-Dreamer

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Now that I finally started reading the actual release, here’s a paragraph that caught my eye, with some bolding added by me.

Engineered as a fully integrated software and hardware solution by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI shatters infrastructure complexities that hold organizations back from deploying AI-at-scale. AIRI is powered by Pure Storage FlashBladeTM, the industry’s first storage platform architected for modern analytics and AI, and four NVIDIA DGX-1 supercomputers, delivering four petaFLOPS of performance with NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 GPUs. These systems are interconnected with Arista 100GbE switches, supporting GPUDirect RDMA for maximum distributed training performance. AIRI is supported by the NVIDIA GPU Cloud deep learning stack and Pure Storage AIRI Scaling Toolkit, enabling data scientists to jumpstart their AI initiatives in hours, not weeks or months.

NVDA
ANET
PSTG

I chuckled to myself when I got to the listing of use of Arista switches.

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Pure Storage, the all-flash storage platform that helps innovators build a better world with data, today announced the first comprehensive AI-Ready Infrastructure, (AIRI), powered by NVIDIA.

It would be interesting to understand who gets what profit from such a collaboration…in the past for example with Apple…all its suppliers seem to get the short end…INTC was mostly the profit from computers…in the case of NVDA…will it also garner most the profits from such collaborations??

Architected by Pure Storage and NVIDIA, AIRI is purpose-built to enable data architects, scientists and business leaders to extend the power of the NVIDIA DGX-1 and operationalize AI-at-scale for every enterprise.

I haven’t really looked into this announcement much but do find it very interesting how everyone wants to associate with NVDA…this is indicative of how gorillas live…everyone wants to be around them and work with them.

Yet, could be that since PSTG controls the software, they would hopefully generate reasonable profits but would still love to know the price breakdown…who gets what from the total sales price pie.

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NVDA
ANET
PSTG

I chuckled to myself when I got to the listing of use of Arista switches.

Interesting to hear it from the horse’s mouth, disrupting incumbents in chips, storage, and switches. Gives comfort to the investor!

Denny Schlesinger
Long only NVDA

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The other practical consideration is who sells it and what portion do those sellers get credit for.
Motivation is everything for salespeople, and with technology this new and technical, you won’t always get clients reaching out to you - you have to educate and create the industry in some cases by evangelizing the benefits.

Will Pure sales sell the whole solution - you would imagine so. Pure partners with the IT channel, so then the number of sellers branches out.
NVIDIA has direct sales force and also partners with channel.
Same with Arista.

Then question becomes if this is eventually an HGX version or based in AWS or Azure, then are the sales folks within those organizations selling it. (they would likely be paid on the monthly subscription costs whereas Arista, NVIDIA, and Pure would get credit for their various pieces).

My first gut reaction is that this is 80% a Pure sales force play and 20% NVIDIA, in terms of who will impact market the most. Maybe even 90/10. Pure reps would want to lead high with something like DGX but then could “settle” for just selling some flash storage. NVIDIA would not benefit in a scenario like that.

This is all under the cover stuff, but it does matter in my experience.
-Dreamer

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It would be interesting to understand who gets what profit from such a collaboration…

Pure sent out the press release so it’s apparently their product, and I’d imagine it just includes switches from Arista and chips etc from Nvidia. Except that, in this case they said architected with Nvidia, so maybe Nvidia has some share in the profits, but I suspect they just get to sell a bunch of chips etc, and Pure sells the whole thing as their product. Just my guess.

Saul

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For what it is worth, I just got a response from PSTG Investor Relations.

Joel, Thanks for the note. Yes, there was a miscommunication on timing this am. The release will be back up shortly. All the best, Matt.

My suspicion was correct, fwiw…gonna be paying attention to the NVDA keynote coming up in a bit more than 15 minutes.

-volfan84/Joel

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I think the jury is still out on how the pie is cut. In my experience (aerospace - OK, maybe not comparable) design partners usually get an equity share. If there’s capital or R&D sharing the are virtually assured an equity share. I don’t think we have sufficient information to know who gets what and how much.

Here is a link to the stream of the NVDA keynote.

https://www.ustream.tv/gpu-technology-conference

Stream hasn’t begun yet, but I see that Pure Storage is a Platinum Sponsor for this keynote (along with Google Cloud and about 8 others).

The AIRI looks like an absolute monster. As for the pie, could it be considered like an OEM product put out probably by Pure in this instance? It is their press release at least.

Looking under the hood, it has 4 Nvidia DGX-1 supercomputers that have 8 Tesla V-100 GPUs each. A Volta DGX station retails for $164K.

http://www.nextwarehouse.com/item/?2707240_g10e

Now that price is for an individual fully loaded DGX-1. Some of the tech in the Flashblade and Arista Switches May eliminate some of the components that a normal DGX-1 would include, so that would probably mean that the AIRI DGX might be a little less expensive. And even with special pricing it would be easy to see NVDA would get a lot of revenue from a single AIRI system.
They deliver a petaflop of computing power each, so 4 petaflops. That is a lot of horsepower.

For Pure and Arista it’s more difficult to tell. I can’t find info on pricing for a FlashBlade and it’s probably scalable as to how many Blades a customer may purchase depending on their needs. But if Pure is acting as a bundled OEM they could get a nice chunk of the overall sale as well. Arista would benefit from the sale of more switches but with available information this would be impossible to tell how much they might get.

Really an exciting product. All three companies will benefit from this hitting the market, but with the rather large price tag for the DGX-1 supercomputer components, it’s a good bet that Nvidia will see the most revenue out of an AIRI system.

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Thanks for posting this link.
I am just a 1/3 of the way through this keynote.
Many impressive items but for investors, I found most interesting statement this one (paraphrasing it):

“People are downloading CUDA software for 10 years and of the total cumulative downloads, half of it was in last year”

In other words, in last 12 months, NVDA has added as many CUDA programmers as they did in previous 9 years combined!

That’s just amazing. If you believe number of CUDA downloads translates linearly adding revenue, Nvidia has tremendous growth ahead!

And with small crash today, seems like a nice entry / add point.

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