Getting Started with NVIDIA Containers and DIGITS

For the GTC 2019 conference, IAS wanted to put together something to demonstrate the value of NVIDIA's DGX platform for artificial intelligence and machine learning. I've never actually done anything like this before and so I welcomed the opportunity to get my hands on the DGX Station and learning how to unleash the power of Tesla V100 cards. I'm far from building SkyNet, but it only took a few days to get the hang of everything and get something rolling. To help others on this journey, I'm going to outline the process I used to get the DGX Station running a DIGITS docker container, download the MNIST data set, and do the basic test of DIGITS with some image classification. This is not the only way to accomplish this and this way might be a little "dirty", but it worked and the results were there. Thus, take this as a guide and move on from there. In our lab, everything is...
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Ansible Tower Demo

I mentioned in my recent NetApp Insight post that we created an Ansible Tower demo to show off at Insight this year. The Tower demo took the playbooks we created for Ansible Engine to spin up EC2 instances in AWS and clone a volume hosted on Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and with some slight tweaking, adjusted them to work in Ansible Tower as a Workflow. Like before, I wanted to record this demo so that others could see how the whole process worked. Because Tower is more a repo friendly solution for environments, we also created a GitHub repo for both the Ansible Engine playbooks and the Ansible Tower playbooks. They are slightly different, mostly because of how inventories are handled in Tower vs Engine. Additionally, there are some differences in how we handle variables and pass them from one playbook to another. I hope this demo is helpful for others to get going on their Ansible journey. If you want to check...
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NetApp Insight 2018 – IAS Update and Demos

Hey everyone. I hope you're all doing well as always. NetApp Insight 2018 was last week and for the first time, I was able to attend. There was some concern that my wife might go into labor while I was gone, but the little one was nice enough to hang out through the conference. With that said, let's review some of the IAS stuff we did at Insight. IAS had a speaking session on Tuesday that had a solid turnout from attendees. The focus was on our updated Ansible demo that shows Ansible working its magic on EC2 instances and NetApp Cloud ONTAP. Shawn Hamby also did a great overview of Cloud Volume Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and the benefits of each. We also showed a little demo on Ansible Tower and how the entire set of playbooks we had already done in Ansible Engine could be combined into a single Tower Workflow. I think attendees were pleased that the session...
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Ansible Demo v2 – Scaling to AWS EC2 using Red Hat Ansible and Leveraging NetApp Cloud ONTAP

Hey folks. I hope everyone is doing well. A real quick update on the Ansible Demo that we build several months ago for Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The original demo was build mostly using the RAW module because at the time of the creation of the demo, NetApp had not yet published modules that would be relevant to the demo. However, that's all changed over the past few months and now NetApp has more Ansible modules than any other storage vendor. Hats off to David Blackburn and his team for working on it and keeping the updates rolling. With all of the changes, we decided to make a version two of the Ansible demo to showcase more NetApp modules than RAW commands. We still cannot completely move away from RAW commands as things, like collecting ONTAP version information and setting a Junction Path during a clone operation, are just not 100% available yet via a module. But at least we...
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