The meager supply and high salaries of data scientists have led to a decision among many companies totally in keeping with artificial intelligence ― to automate whatever is possible. Case in point is machine learning. A Forrester study found that automated machine learning (AutoML) has been adopted by 61% of data and analytics decision makers in companies using AI, with another 25% of companies saying they'll do so in the next year. Automated machine learning (AutoML) automates repetitive and manual machine learning tasks. That's no small thing, especially when data scientists and data analysts now spend a majority of their time cleaning, sourcing, and preparing data.

Last September, Cisco announced a new UCS platform, the Cisco UCS C480ML M5 designed specifically for intensive AI and ML workloads. Cisco has met and worked with customers to identify workload patterns that make up individual data pipelines. As Cisco's Han Yang presented in his blog, no data pipeline is alike and customers developing artificial intelligence and machine learning based applications depend on dedicated platforms to manage their sophisticated and complex data pipeline; an infrastructure for data ingestion, dedicated clusters for workload compute processing, and a storage platform that easily scales and protects the raw and subsequent processed data. Cisco and Pure Storage have teamed to provide a solution for deep learning and AI workloads. FlashStack for AI combines the compute scale of the Cisco UCS C480ML M5 with the storage scalability of Pure's FlashBlade and packaged within the FlashStack platform.