Imagine a global media studio, where editors, animators and producers unite across time zones to bring imaginative stories to life—on deadline and at scale. Each day, they generate terabytes of footage, animations and creative assets. They need instant access to massive digital libraries, smooth collaboration between teams and the ability to search, tag, and deliver content at unprecedented speed. In an industry where every second counts, the right data infrastructure is the backbone of creativity.
The Dell AI Data Platform is built precisely for a world where data is gold. Designed for today’s scale and complexity, it empowers creative teams to break down data silos, accelerate every step in their production pipeline and build rich, AI-enabled experiences. Through deeper collaboration with NVIDIA and a new partnership with Elastic, we are delivering a tightly integrated AI stack that streamlines the ability to build, deploy and scale enterprise AI—whether for media and entertainment or any other industry.
Latest highlights in the Dell AI Data Platform
Dell’s latest innovation introduces significant advancements to help enterprises harness AI at scale:
Compute & Acceleration
- Dell PowerEdge R7725 servers with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs accelerate the capabilities of the AI Data Platform with a high-performance, universal 2U rack-mounted data center platform engineered for demanding enterprise AI, industrial AI and advanced visual computing workloads. Complete with efficient passive cooling and unified management, organizations can deploy faster, reduce overhead and drive results with confidence across their organization.
Storage & Data Management
- Dell PowerScale (scale-out NAS) and ObjectScale (S3-compatible object storage) support structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data – including massive media files, scene metadata tables, render job logs, scripts and project assets.
Networking
- NVIDIA ConnectX-8 NICs: Offer ultra-low-latency networking with RoCE offloads, NVIDIA GPUDirect® Storage support and up to 800 Gb/s connectivity. These SmartNICs supercharge AI workloads with unmatched efficiency and scalability.
- NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs: Redefining Data Center Efficiency: Delivering up to 400 Gb/s networking with GPUDirect® Storage support, BlueField-3 offloads networking, storage, and security tasks from the CPU, enhancing efficiency and performance for AI and cloud workloads.
- Dell PowerSwitch SN5000 Series: AI-Optimized Ethernet Switching: Featuring up to 51.2 Tb/s switching capacity, ultra-low latency and seamless integration with NVIDIA Spectrum-X, the NVIDIA SN5000 series switch family accelerates generative AI and scales effortlessly for modern data center demands.
Search & Retrieval
- NVIDIA NeMo Retriever is a collection of micro-services for building world-class information retrieval systems. Developers can flexibly leverage select, fine-tuned NeMo Retriever micro-services in combination with LLM models to build a scalable data extraction and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application.
- Elasticsearch is a fast, scalable vector database for structured, unstructured and vector data-powering hybrid search, real-time analytics, and exceptional relevance through one flexible API. Hybrid search with Elasticsearch combines keyword precision and semantic understanding to deliver highly relevant results—more accurate than either approach alone, even at extreme scale.
- With these upgrades, teams can iterate faster, unlock more value from their content, automate asset management and keep projects on track—no matter the complexity.
Real-world use case: accelerating content production in media & entertainment
Consider a media and entertainment studio launching the next blockbuster animated series. Every production phase—storyboarding, rendering, editing—relies on timely, secure and intelligent access to a vast asset library. Creative professionals need to find specific clips or animations, share updates across continents and automate repetitive groundwork like tagging or metadata enrichment.
With the Dell AI Data Platform, this workflow transforms:
- Instant Asset Search: Editors use natural language search powered by Elasticsearch vector database to pinpoint the perfect scene, eliminating the need to hunt through countless folders. NVIDIA’s Omniverse libraries and AI models like USD Search further enhance this by enabling precise, context-aware searches across complex 3D asset libraries, streamlining the discovery of models, textures and animations.
- Seamless Collaboration: Animators and VFX artists access 3D models and textures in real time, regardless of location, thanks to unified storage and high-speed networking.
- Automated Pipelines: AI-driven data engines automate routine tasks, freeing creators to focus on storytelling. Continuous integration with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform accelerates inferencing and rendering, shaving valuable hours (or days) off production timelines.
This isn’t hypothetical. With Dell, NVIDIA, and Elastic, today’s studios are turning the dream of high-output, AI-powered production into reality – delivering more content, with higher quality and at record speed.
Key outcomes for enterprise AI
These innovations translate into real business and creative benefits:
High-Performance AI Infrastructure
- From media production to financial services, the Dell AI Data Platform accelerates data processing, communication and storage for real-time, low-latency applications.
Comprehensive Data Support
- The platform is agnostic—structured databases, video and audio archives, animation files or evolving project assets are all managed in one unified environment.
Built for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Integrate proprietary enterprise data—like scripts, visual assets and audience feedback into AI workflows. Elevate recommendation engines, search and analytics for more tailored results.
Always-On Data Processing
- Continuous data extraction and curation keep models, pipelines and productions up to date—ensuring every creative or business decision is based on the freshest information.
Modular and Adaptable Architecture
- Enterprises choose only the components they need – compute, storage, networking or AI software—and scale seamlessly as requirements grow.
Enterprise-Grade Security
- With zero-trust architecture, real-time threat detection and accelerated encryption, sensitive assets and creative IP remain secure, without performance bottlenecks.
Purpose-built data engines: driving the full AI lifecycle
At the core of the platform are three specialized data engines:
- Federated SQL Engine: Powered by Starburst, enables instant querying across multiple, heterogeneous data sources (databases, lakes, object stores) using standard SQL—delivering unified analytics without moving data.
- Unstructured Data Engine: Powered by Elasticsearch, this engine delivers blazing-fast full-text, semantic and vector searches. Editors, producers or analysts can instantly locate any document, clip or snippet across massive archives.
- Data Processing Engine: Built on Apache Spark, enabling batch and real-time analytics, ETL and ML processing for diverse workloads—from rendering queue management to audience analytics.
Returning to our studio example:
When new footage is ingested, these engines immediately index every asset, ensuring it is accessible via natural language search, integrated with dashboards for directors and editors, and processed for quick turnarounds. Built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design and Elasticsearch, it allows rendering farms to scale on demand, eliminating production bottlenecks and empowering teams to work smarter together.
AI-ready storage engines: performance for any scale
Supporting the varied demands of AI-driven media workflows, Dell offers:
- Unified File/Object Storage: Supports both file (NFS/SMB) and object (S3/Swift) protocols, streamlining access across on-premises and cloud resources—a perfect fit for creative teams with hybrid or globally distributed needs.
- S3 Object Storage: Delivers cloud-native scale for unstructured data, ideal for data lakes, model versions and rich multimedia libraries.
- Parallel File System: For tasks demanding high throughput (like large-scale animation rendering or model training), parallel file systems provide the speed required to keep production moving.
For busy production houses, these options mean smoother asset management, reduced downtime and the speed to keep up with even the most ambitious delivery schedules.
Unified, modular and integrated for the future
The Dell AI Data Platform’s architecture is as adaptable as the creative industries it empowers. Need to scale a render farm for a global film release or integrate instant AI-powered search across a hybrid asset archive? The platform lets you start with what you need, scaling out storage, compute or AI software as your ambitions grow.
The platform’s integrations-including Elastic’s powerful Search AI and the NVIDIA AI Data Platform ensure that every team, from IT architects to media editors, works from a single, trusted foundation.
Real-world impact for media and enterprise
Whether orchestrating complex pipelines for animated films or managing global advertising campaigns, organizations rely on Dell’s deep integration of hardware, storage and AI software to enable:
- Fast, federated search and data access across petabyte-scale archives
- Automated asset tagging, compliance checks and metadata management
- Real-time, collaborative workflows regardless of team location
- Scalable infrastructure as projects, teams or data volumes grow
By combining best-in-class data engines, high-performance hardware and seamless integrations, Dell empowers you to turn visionary ideas into a finished product faster—and with greater confidence. The result? Reliable, high-performing AI that keeps creative teams (and their data) moving forward, together.
Want to experience the Dell AI Data Platform firsthand? Visit our Dell Booth #301 at SIGGRAPH where we will debut how Dell, NVIDIA and Elastic are transforming the media and entertainment landscape with enterprise AI. See real-world demos, meet the team and get inspired to reimagine what is possible in your own AI journey.
Check out our latest technical paper for more detail: “Dell AI Data Platform with USD Search and NVIDIA Omniverse.”
Stay tuned for more updates on how Dell is powering the future of data-driven creativity and enterprise-scale AI.
