HPE Discover 2024: HPE, Nvidia team to accelerate GenAI revolution
Partnership on product and sales channels to feature what is described as first-of-its-kind turnkey, private-cloud AI service including sustainable accelerated computing with full lifecycle services to streamline time to value with AI
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) president and CEO Antonio Neri has kicked off the HPE Discover 2024 conference by stating how, in partnership with leading artificial intelligence (AI) chip firm Nvidia, it can deliver AI-based transformations that increase enterprise productivity and accelerate the rate of discovery and innovation.
At the Sphere Las Vegas, Neri’s arrival was preceded by Aristotle’s maxim, “All mankind by nature desires to know.” Applying this to the present, he emphasised that the fundamental theme to the company’s future was that intelligence would have no limits, driven by AI.
“When the human mind is in concert with AI, there is nothing we cannot achieve together,” he said. “HP has consistently provided the essential technologies that transform enterprises and entire industries.
“Everything we have accomplished has led us to this moment today,” said Neri. “We are again leading a revolution on what we have anticipated and adapted for rapidly transforming HPE into an entirely new company. I stand before you full of inspiration as we arrive at the AI solutions that will accelerate this generative AI [GenAI] industrial revolution. [We are making] bold announcements that bring us closer to the potential in the promise of AI, and catapult the enterprise of today and tomorrow to new heights.”
With the right expertise from edge to cloud, he assured that business transformation happens and intelligence has no limits. Data, stressed Neri, was companies’ most valuable asset, and the day is coming “really fast” when data will be reported on balance sheets. He saw a future of training existing data models and running inferencing at the edge to solve business problems such as content generation to accelerate product design and optimisation, as well as customer support experiences.
Yet even though he regarded AI as the ultimate key to success, accelerating not just his company’s purpose in profound new ways but also becoming a top priority for HP customers, Neri cautioned that to be successful, it’s necessary to be purpose-driven, and that the industry needs AI that can be trusted.
“We are stewards of AI upholding our principles with unwavering integrity,” he said. “We are all deeply aware of the transformative power of AI. But AI is hard ... It is tempting to rush in with AI. No one wants to get left behind. Yet innovation at any cost is very dangerous. Hewlett Packard Labs is a researching, developing and deploying technology to help protect privacy and stop attacks. With enhanced security, our enterprise onramps to AI provide the guardrails to help ensure data sovereignty and brand protection. This empowers you to self-learn and react smartly, so that you can turn insight into action in an instant ... With these guardrails, we have to be bulletproof. HPE is positioned to be the steward of AI and not just provide an infrastructure.”
Bridge to the future
Neri said HPE will be building a bridge to the future and making the impossible possible. The company is not just witnessing the future, but shipping it with AI. And key for this is the partnership with Nvidia.
Joining him on stage, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said what is happening in the industry right now is the greatest fundamental computing platform transformation in 60 years.
“It’s a really big deal for enterprise today,” he said. “The fact of the matter is we’re sitting on a mountain of data. All of us. We’ve been collecting it in our businesses for a long time. But until now, we really haven’t had the ability to refine that, then discover insight and codify it automatically into our company’s natural experience. Our digital intelligence.
“Every company is going to be an intelligence manufacturer. Every company is built fundamentally on domain-specific intelligence. For the very first time, we can now digitise that intelligence and turn it into our AI, the corporate AI. I think that’s really profound. And [let’s] remember what AI is. It’s a lifecycle that lives forever.
“The thing that we are looking to do in all of our companies is to turn our corporate intelligence into digital intelligence,” said Huang. “And once we do that, we connect our data and our AI flywheel, so that we collect more data, harvest more insight and create better intelligence, which allows us to provide better services, create or be more productive.”
Concluding his keynote, he said the era of GenAI is here and that enterprises must engage with what he called the single most consequential technology in history. “You must translate and condense your company’s intelligence into digital intelligence,” said Huang. “And you must find a way as quickly as possible to turn that flywheel of your company’s experience into your company’s AI as quickly as possible. Our partnership with HP is about simplifying all of this incredibly complicated technology.”
And the tangible product from this is Nvidia AI Computing by HPE, a portfolio of co-developed AI offerings and joint go-to-market integrations that are claimed to enable enterprises to accelerate adoption of GenAI. HPE and Nvidia believe the launch marks the expansion of a decades-long partnership and reflects the substantial commitment of time and resources from each company.
Read more about AI and networking
- Cisco gears up to cash in on AI innovation and investments: Networking giant plots out artificial intelligence-powered future within networks to build digital resilience and offer secure visibility, observability and insight across digital footprints, with $1bn global AI investment fund.
- AI set to improve network operational efficiency by 40% or more: Study of telecom and IT engineers exploring artificial intelligence’s impact on the network sees almost universal belief in need to upgrade fibre-optic networks to support more AI traffic.
- AI in networks to live or die by trust: Cloud networking provider unveils hub for research, development and innovation in networking previews, tapping AI to offer a new way to design, optimise and deploy networks.
Putting the launch of the new technology service into perspective, Neri noted that GenAI holds immense potential for enterprise transformation, but the complexities of fragmented AI technology contain too many risks and barriers that hamper large-scale enterprise adoption and can jeopardise a company’s most valuable asset, namely its proprietary data.
“To unleash the immense potential of generative AI in the enterprise, HPE and Nvidia co-developed a turnkey private cloud for AI that will enable enterprises to focus their resources on developing new AI use cases that can boost productivity and unlock new revenue streams,” he said.
Huang added: “Generative AI and accelerated computing are fuelling a fundamental transformation as every industry races to join the industrial revolution. Never before have Nvidia and HPE integrated our technologies so deeply – combining the entire Nvidia AI computing stack along with HPE’s private cloud technology – to equip enterprise clients and AI professionals with the most advanced computing infrastructure and services to expand the frontier of AI.”
Among the portfolio’s offerings is HPE Private Cloud AI, described as a first-of-its-kind service that provides the deepest integration to date of Nvidia AI computing, networking and software with HPE’s AI storage, compute and the HPE GreenLake cloud.
The offering is said to enable enterprises of every size to gain an energy-efficient, fast and flexible path for sustainably developing and deploying GenAI applications.
Powered by the new OpsRamp AI copilot that helps IT operations improve workload and IT efficiency, HPE Private Cloud AI also includes a self-service cloud experience with full lifecycle management, and is available in four right-sized configurations to support a range of AI workloads and use cases. It offers support for inference, fine-tuning and RAG AI workloads that utilise proprietary data and enterprise control for data privacy, security, transparency and governance requirements. The firms added that it delivers a cloud experience with ITOps and AIOps capabilities to increase productivity.
The AI and data software stack has at its foundation the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform, which includes Nvidia NIM inference microservices. The platform is designed to accelerate data science pipelines and streamlines the development and deployment of production-grade copilots and other GenAI applications. Included with Nvidia AI Enterprise, Nvidia NIM also delivers microservices for optimised AI model inferencing to offer a smooth transition from prototype to secure deployment of AI models in a variety of use cases.
Trusted AI services
Complementing Nvidia AI Enterprise and Nvidia NIM, HPE AI Essentials software delivers a ready-to-run set of curated AI and data foundation tools with a unified control plane that provides adaptable solutions, ongoing enterprise support and trusted AI services. These include data and model compliance and extensible features designed to ensure AI pipelines are in compliance, explainable and reproducible throughout the AI lifecycle.
OpsRamp’s IT operations are integrated with HPE GreenLake cloud to deliver observability and AIOps to all HPE products and services. OpsRamp now provides observability for the end-to-end Nvidia accelerated computing stack, including Nvidia NIM and AI software, Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs and AI clusters, as well as Nvidia Quantum InfiniBand and Nvidia Spectrum Ethernet switches. Through this combination, IT administrators can gain insights to identify anomalies and monitor their AI infrastructure and workloads across hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
The new OpsRamp operations copilot uses Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform to analyse large datasets for insights with a conversational assistant, boosting productivity for operations management. OpsRamp will also integrate with APIs from cyber security firm CrowdStrike.
HPE Private Cloud AI is expected to be generally available in the autumn of 2024. All Nvidia AI Computing by HPE offerings and services will be available through a joint go-to-market strategy that spans sales teams and channel partners, training and a global network of system integrators – including Deloitte, HCLTech, Infosys, TCS and Wipro – to help enterprises across a variety of industries run complex AI workloads.
Putting the launch into perspective, HPE chief technology officer Fidelma Russo remarked that as AI becomes a transformational workload, the discussion is now around how enterprises modernise infrastructures to take advantage of the data they have. The conversation, said Russo, is now about how to give customers control over the decisions they are making in their environment, and how to have choice and simplicity.
She noted that HPE Private Cloud AI is intended to allow customers to bring productivity to their customers quickly, and that the company has built a system, not “just a bunch of parts that have come together”.
“[We are looking] to deliver solutions and services within Nvidia to our customers in order to make sure that we accelerate the adoption of GenAI solutions in the marketplace,” said Russo. “Making sure that we’re all developing and adopting Nvidia solutions to bring them to our customers as fast as possible, and then making sure we’re in the economics of generative AI to our customers so they can bring productivity to their businesses as fast as possible.”
