Pure Storage Nabs First-ever NVIDIA AI Infrastructure and Operations Certification 

Sometimes, you just have to toot your own horn. 

Pure Storage Systems Engineer Jared Magaro has become the first person in the world to attain NVIDIA’s AI Infrastructure and Operations certification. Jared’s amazing accomplishment underscores Pure Storage’s focus to lead the industry in AI innovation.

“I posted the certification on LinkedIn and found out an hour or two later from the Technical Certification Lead at NVIDIA that I was the first person to pass, which is crazy,” Jared said.

We chatted with Jared to learn what this certification means to him and Pure Storage’s vision for an AI data platform as we ride this next big wave of innovation.

What Does the Certification Mean for Pure Storage Customers?

Although many will take the certification exam, Jared will always be the first to pass it. 

This new certification validates the foundational concepts of AI computing related to infrastructure and operations—something that’s critical to get right before diving into complex AI implementations. And, there’s no better time to become an expert in that. 

“We have customers who are integrating AI into their business operations to serve many purposes. It’s an evolving world that is growing in complexity and cost. It’s important as a Systems Engineer to continue educating oneself and [the certification] definitely plays a role in the holistic story of a customer’s AI journey—from experimentation to cleansing of data to training, to ultimately inferencing.”

NVIDIA’s AI Infrastructure and Operations certification covers a range of topics including: accelerated computing use cases; AI, machine learning, and deep learning; GPU architecture; NVIDIA’s software suite; and infrastructure and operation considerations for adopting NVIDIA solutions. Jared believes these topics are important to understand as they will continue to come up more often.
This accomplishment certainly highlights our commitment to customers—and our competitive advantage. It will also be invaluable for Jared’s swath of New York City-based customers who span financial services, legal services, retail, and more—verticals that are all prime use cases for AI.

Building on the Pure-NVIDIA Partnership

Pure Storage is an Elite member of the NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) and works closely with NVIDIA engineering and mutual channel partners to ensure solution integration support. The Pure Storage and NVIDIA partnership began in 2018 with the first and original AIRI®. In March of this year, Pure Storage announced the collaboration to achieve storage partner validation for NVIDIA-Certified OVX servers powered by L40S GPUs and FlashBlade//S™.

This addition to our recent AIRI DGX BasePOD and new FlashStack® for AI makes Pure Storage the go-to provider for enterprise AI-ready infrastructure solutions. Pure Storage is also working with NVIDIA to demonstrate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline for AI inference, complementing new NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices, also announced at NVIDIA GTC.

“I have enjoyed studying BasePOD and SuperPOD at a more detailed level as the partnership with Pure and NVIDIA continues to grow,” Jared said.

The Power of the Pure Storage Data Platform for AI 

Jared says the most exciting thing about Pure Storage’s future with AI is its strategic positioning and competitive advantages that have been carefully crafted over the last decade to bolster customer success.

“A lot of customers, when they’re first starting out from an experimentation perspective, might be doing a lot in the cloud or a desktop workstation,” Jared says. “But as their data sets become larger and their developers require experimentation at a more rapid pace, that’s where larger, on-prem infrastructure becomes a lot more advantageous than the cloud.”

When those projects begin to accelerate and scale, Jared says that’s where Pure Storage can add significant value.

“You need your data to be sitting on flash storage that can balance performance, energy efficiency, capacity density, and cost economics” he said, adding that spinning disk clearly hasn’t been cutting it for AI workloads. “Keeping data within your own walls is also really important from a security perspective.”

Legacy solutions struggle with AI-based workloads, but even new AI-centric data storage solutions are running into challenges with complexity and instability. Jared says this is another way Pure Storage stands apart. “Pure has a big advantage when it comes to that because we are designed to be a very simple platform that can operate under one data plane. We are also the only true direct flash architecture.”

If the AI explosion plays out like we think it will, there’s an even bigger story. An efficient, performant, all-flash data platform like Pure Storage will be the only foundation to enable the kind of ROI investors are hoping for. “Pure has a pivotal role to play,” Jared says. “I think that we are going to be transformational to the world of AI, and I’m really excited to ride that wave.”

People of Pure: We Empower Innovators

Ultimately, it’s not just our platform that sets us apart, it’s our people. Pure Storage professionals like Jared work very closely with customers, providing white-glove service and always pushing things forward to make sure they’re getting the most out of their data platform. The proof is in our NPS score and being named a Gartner^® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for 10 consecutive years. 

“I only see AI becoming more prevalent in everyday business. The more that we can stay on the forefront of what’s happening in the AI Infrastructure ecosystem, the more we have opportunities to support our customers. I am just excited to be part of it and learn as much as I can.”

Interested in earning the certification yourself? Pure Storage employees have free access thanks to our partnership with NVIDIA. “I was able to access the training through NVIDIA’s partner portal, which gave me free access to training.” 

Learn more about the partnership between NVIDIA and Pure Storage.