Eliminating bottlenecks to unleash AI innovation

Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, STN provides a full spectrum of infrastructure and technology services for modern workloads. From high-quality managed services to hardware and software resale, STN offers tailored solutions that help customers unlock competitive advantage.

STN was founded with a singular vision: to be the partner that AI-first, security-driven organizations trust the most. To realize this ambition, the company is continually evolving and enhancing its solutions and services, backed by people deeply invested in customer success.

Sabur Mian, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of STN, explains: “From the start, we’ve focused relentlessly on what’s right for each individual customer. We’ve long worked with companies at the very cutting edge of emerging technologies such as AI, and we love to help our clients solve complex problems.”

For more than eight years, STN has worked closely with Everpure™ to steadily expand its service offering. Starting with backup- and disaster-recovery-as-a-service offerings, the company now operates a comprehensive managed services portfolio.

“We started seeing more and more requests from AI start-ups to help run their GPU environments,” says Mian. “Creating a GPU-as-a-service offering was the natural next step on our journey.”

As it explored the GPU-as-a-service opportunity, STN identified a gap in the market for a specialized platform that could support even the most demanding AI factory workloads.

“If you talk to AI researchers working on foundation models, you’ll find that most of them spend a great deal of their time moving data from large object storage repositories to the platforms where the model training actually takes place,” explains Mian. “Model training relies on vast data sets with massive amounts of metadata. From a storage infrastructure perspective, one of the biggest challenges is serving up data fast enough to ensure that GPUs are utilized to the full.”

Teague Goddard, Director of Business Development and Partner Alliance at STN, comments: “Over the years, we’ve built up a strong reputation for secure, enterprise-grade services, and we are now HIPAA-certified, PCI-certified, and SOC2 and SOC3 compliant. We aim to bring that same rigor to the new GPU side of our business.”

Drawing on a successful eight-year relationship with Everpure, STN chose to standardize its AI data layer on Everpure FlashBlade//S™ solutions, alongside deploying FlashBlade//EXA for its most demanding AI factory workloads.

Mian recalls: “Everpure cares about our clients as much as we do, and they’ve been with us since the very beginning of STN. The team went out of their way to set us up with our first FlashArray™ when we were a newly minted start-up with very limited capital to invest in infrastructure, and the relationship has stayed strong ever since. Taking care of clients is part of Everpure’s DNA, just like it is for us.”

By harnessing Everpure FlashBlade//EXA, STN gains a high‑density storage fabric designed for extreme throughput and low‑latency metadata operations—the perfect fit for the performance profile of large‑scale AI factories.

“With a traditional storage infrastructure, the main limiting factors are how close you can get your data to the GPUs—because you can’t beat PCI speeds—and how much of your data can live close to those AI workloads,” says Mian. “We had been experimenting with a distributed cache architecture based on JuiceFS [JFS] to improve cache performance and throughput. When we discovered that Everpure could deliver these capabilities natively via FlashBlade//EXA, we knew it would be ideal for our use case.”

Using an Everpure FlashBlade//S500 storage appliance, STN can deliver a scale‑out file and object tier for training data, checkpoints, features, logs, and model artifacts across many AI/ML and GPU-as-a-service workloads. Everpure FlashBlade//EXA adds multidimensional performance through massively parallel processing and scalable metadata IOPS to support STN’s extreme requirements.

In combination, the Everpure technologies deliver both scalable, low-latency metadata access and extremely high data throughput, helping to keep GPU utilization high at all times.

“Before we started with FlashBlade//EXA, the best read throughput we achieved with JFS was around 35GB/s—and that was on a highly optimized data set of small files,” says Mian. “Now, each node can use up to 800Gbps of front-end bandwidth and deliver as much as 100GB/s of throughput.”

Goddard adds: “Data storage is the real differentiator for custom training, tuning, and performance. Everpure technology is playing a key role in setting our offerings apart from the competition.”

Through GPU One, STN is delivering game-changing performance for AI research. Engineered for continuous AI workload operation, GPU One provides industry-leading performance for model training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-throughput AI pipelines, powered by NVIDIA H100, H200, L40S, RTX PRO 6000, and B200 GPUs.

“Everpure technology allows us to deliver data storage performance at unprecedented consistency for even the most demanding AI workloads,” says Mian. “In a typical storage infrastructure, researchers might start training a model on four nodes and get good performance—but as soon as they start scaling up, that performance collapses. With FlashBlade//EXA, we’ve scaled up to 192 nodes so far, and we’ve yet to find the limit.”

He adds: “We recently had one of our FlashBlade//S500 clients test the new FlashBlade//EXA architecture. They saw an immediate 20% performance boost for their training workflows—and the only bottleneck they encountered was compute, not storage. We’re seeing those positive trends across the board, including a consistent 10% performance improvement for inference workloads.”

For STN, launching GPU One is just the latest phase in an ongoing evolution. The full-spectrum service provider anticipates a long and fruitful partnership with Everpure in the years to come.

Mian concludes: “We hope to provide a continuous feedback loop to Everpure so we can keep evolving our offerings together to deliver even more gains to our customers and improve our bottom line. At STN, we stay one step ahead of the marketplace, and Everpure is a key partner in helping us do that.”