MinIO and F5 to Enhance AI Workloads with High-Performance Object Storage and Distributed Application Services

MinIO, the leader in high-performance, Kubernetes-native object storage, today announced a strategic partnership with F5, the global leader in multicloud application security and delivery. This collaboration unites MinIO’s cutting-edge, scalable storage solutions with F5’s high-performance traffic management and security technologies to enhance AI workloads, especially at exascale levels. Together, MinIO and F5 will address unique challenges of large-scale AI deployments by providing optimized data flow, robust security, and seamless hybrid and multicloud networking.

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MinIO’s recently launched AIStor was built for AI and ML workloads and works out of the box with every major AI/ML technology. It is the world’s fastest object store with GETs/PUTs benchmark results that exceed 2.2 TiB/sec and 1.0 TiB/sec on 260 nodes of NVMe drives and a 100GbE network. From predictive models to GenAI, MinIO delivers the performance and scalability to power the AI enterprise.

“In partnering with MinIO on massive AI-centric workloads, we have seen first-hand their ability to deliver performance at scale at hundreds of petabytes,” said Mike Rau, SVP of Technical Enterprise Strategy and Business Development at F5. “The ability to create reference architectures and product integrations to solve customer problems at this scale with F5’s exceptional high-performing traffic management and security solutions offers a robust and comprehensive answer to the challenges facing organizations building large-scale S3 object stores.”

F5 BIG-IP, F5 Distributed Cloud Services, and F5 NGINX offerings provide the security, network connectivity, deployment flexibility, and traffic management needed to connect, secure, and manage AI/ML apps and workloads in the cloud, at the edge, or in the F5 Global Network. Highly scalable, high-performance traffic load balancing can deliver layer 4/7 throughput of 3+ Tbps on 32 blades of F5 VELOS. F5 also recently announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to deploy BIG-IP on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to help optimize large-scale AI infrastructure while also freeing up CPU resources.

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“The scale associated with modern AI workloads is orders of magnitude larger than what we saw even 24 months ago,” said Manjusha Gangadharan, Head of Sales and Partnerships at MinIO. “Working with F5 gives our joint customers the opportunity to leverage best in class networking, unparalleled security and cutting-edge traffic management. MinIO and F5 are cornerstones of large-scale data infrastructure and are mission critical for successful private cloud AI deployments, as we have seen in production.”

As organizations increasingly adopt AI-driven solutions, the demand for efficient data storage and management is paramount. This partnership will empower enterprises to harness the full potential of their AI initiatives by ensuring reliable access to data while maintaining the performance and security required for sensitive workloads.

Key Highlights of Technology Collaboration:

• Optimized Data Flow for AI and Advanced Analytics Workloads: Integration ensures high-speed, seamless data flow and scalability to meet the requirements of exascale AI deployments, ideal for storing and processing large datasets used in advanced analytics and AI applications.
• Robust AI Security Measures: F5’s industry-leading security solutions provide comprehensive protection for AI-driven applications, offering organizations peace of mind as they scale AI/ML infrastructure to production levels.
• Streamlined Data Ingestion and Management: Deployed anywhere—public cloud, private cloud, on-prem, or edge—MinIO and F5 enable data to be securely stored and managed across a distributed infrastructure, empowering organizations to keep data close to where it’s generated for optimal performance.
• Efficient and Secure Data Collection from the Edge: F5 Distributed Cloud Mesh and global traffic management facilitate secure, efficient data ingestion from the edge back to a MinIO-based central data lake for AI model training, business intelligence, and data analytics.

Real World Use Case: Exascale Data Collection and Management

As industries increasingly rely on automation, vast amounts of data are generated from sensors, cameras, and other telemetry systems. This data is critical for AI modeling to advance autonomous capabilities. A global manufacturing company is taking advantage of the MinIO and F5 partnership by using F5’s secure traffic management to collect, transmit, and safeguard data efficiently in real time, directly from the edge to a central data lake. This central repository, based on MinIO, serves as the foundation for AI model training, where data is analyzed to enhance edge system perception, decision-making, and overall system performance.

With the combined power of F5 and MinIO solutions, enterprises are equipped to tackle the challenges of AI exascale data management head-on, ensuring their AI applications run smoother, faster, and more securely than ever before.

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