Faced with complex and diverse challenges, Taiwan AI Labs —Asia’s first non-profit artificial intelligence research organization — opted for Synology’s comprehensive line of storage systems to build the core of its AI training infrastructure.
Working with both the private and public sectors, the research hub has spearheaded cutting-edge research leveraging the power of AI, including the development of automated diagnostics for COVID-19 and the design and implementation of Taiwan’s social distancing app.
With requirements spanning from massive parallel processing during the training phase to high data and service availability when powering the newly developed applications, the Taiwan AI Labs IT team was looking for a versatile solution to efficiently manage the ever-growing data pool generated by its diverse portfolio of projects.
“Synology’s unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability are exactly what we needed to build our petabyte-scale data warehouse,” Taiwan AI Labs explained.
Keeping scalability and reliability requirements in mind, the IT team chose Synology enterprise storage systems to build a powerful object storage cluster, complementing it with all-flash systems for added performance when tackling latency-sensitive workloads.
Running off from the storage provided by Synology systems, the team leverages Kubernetes to streamline the provisioning and management of individual services. To remove single points of failure in critical production environments, Synology High Availability (SHA) clusters were employed.
To operate with maximum transparency in an industry where data security is paramount, the organization designed a backup architecture using highly scalable Synology SA series units and Snapshot Replication to create point-in-time copies of shared folders and LUNs, which can be restored quickly in the event of accidental or malicious deletion.
The organization now plans to leverage Hyper Backup and C2 Storage as one of the solutions needed to complete its 3-2-1 backup architecture , adding resiliency to the deployment and further reducing IT management overhead.
“From project conceptualization to final delivery and support, Synology solutions provide a solid foundation for us to focus on research and development without being limited by infrastructure,” Taiwan AI Labs explained.