Adopt AI with confidence on integrated platform from Red Hat and Intel

This article was co-authored by Radhika Anand, Intel AI COE, Sridhar R. Kayathi, Principal Engineer at Intel, and Thomas Mccurdy, Red Hat North America Partner Sales at Intel Corporation. 

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have profoundly transformed numerous diverse industries, from healthcare to finance and manufacturing. World Wide Technology (WWT) believes that these transformations are largely driven by the increasing availability of data and the development of advanced analytics techniques to utilize that data. 

Organizations are looking to apply AI in novel ways, whether to enrich customer experiences, enhance internal decision-making, or improve operational efficiencies. But, to realize those goals, they've faced a significant and complex challenge: how to create the right physical infrastructure to support demanding AI workloads with the capabilities needed today while planning ahead for tomorrow.

Now, deploying AI has become vastly easier and more efficient with a new integrated solution stack from Red HatOpenShift AI combined with AI-optimized hardware and software technologies from Intel enabled by WWT and accelerated by the unique lab environment in our AI Proving Ground (AIPG). Equipped with these assets, organizations looking to test and deploy secure, efficient AI can do so with confidence and ease.

The many complex elements of effective AI deployment

Today, some organizations with in-house IT teams can choose to acquire the various infrastructure components—processors, accelerators, switches, storage, and other elements to run on different servers—to power a do-it-yourself AI solution. But before going that route, they should recognize the complexity, requirements and risks involved:

• Resource and access management - The emergence of more complex AI applications and use cases presents new challenges for IT, and simply deploying a hypervisor as a default solution in a traditional data center does not suffice. IT faces challenges with not only controlling permissions but also tracking who is doing what with which resources. Additionally, IT teams face the ongoing task of keeping up with rapid advancements across multiple hardware and software technologies, which are evolving at an accelerated pace.
• Scaling AI infrastructure to broader workflows – As recently as 18 months ago, most organizations did not have an AI-capable infrastructure in the data center. Of those that did, their dedicated hardware stacks were separate from the tiers supporting operations and were accessible only by a few. Today, customers adopting an AI infrastructure want to leverage portions of that newer, more performant capability for a larger portion of the workflows they are supporting.
• Managing security during rapid scaling - Another challenge involves scaling out new performant workflows that require an appropriate support infrastructure. Those workflows are being massively deployed as organizations start to experience success with AI initiatives. WWT continues to see new ways that AI workflows are applied by end-users, who are deriving deeper insight from analytics and truthful interactive answers. Using any cloud or public AI solution blindly can lead to security exploits. This means additional guardrails and security measures must be implemented and monitored. Building your own AI infrastructure offers increased security with the ability to find and fix issues before they cause problems.
• Right-sizing today while planning for tomorrow – The key is to build the right AI infrastructure with capabilities (and cost) to support current applications while ensuring sufficient scalability for the future. After all, it's needlessly expensive and inefficient to rebuild a data center that should have been done right the first time. Customers of WWT leverage our AIPG to help evaluate and design their production deployments, making sure it's right-sized for positive business outcomes at scale.
• Adequate and efficient power and cooling – Another critical element in creating an efficient and cost-effective data center for AI is planning for sufficient electrical and environmental resources. You don't want to learn only after your data center is built that you'll have to wait for utilities to provide the power to operate – leaving you in limbo and costing you lost productivity and budget.

Enabling AI involves more than having the right hardware– you need a simple, intuitive, integrated solution that's equally accessible for data scientists and data engineers as well as for IT staff who speak a different language.  And, it requires allocating time to ramp up the right skillsets, training and processes to deploy, manage and maintain the infrastructure. Organizations that have not updated their policies and processes are limiting their ability to deploy next-generation AI solutions. 

Lastly, it calls for making a strong business case to justify the investment in an AI infrastructure, demonstrating cost efficiencies that can derive a positive revenue stream and a healthy ROI. 

Simplifying AI deployment with Red Hat and Intel integrated AI solution stack

In May of this year, ecosystem allies Red Hat and Intel announced their collaboration on a comprehensive platform for deploying and managing AI applications. Using this new integrated solution stack, data scientists and data engineers no longer need to access individual servers for specific use cases in a complicated manner. Now, they can access the entire infrastructure easily at once with all the combined capabilities they need – summoning the resources necessary for any given task. 

Red Hat provides the orchestration component with OpenShift  as the container platform and OpenShift AI as the glue that holds it all together. This platform accommodates diverse AI methodologies from deep learning to fine-tuning a pre-trained model to conventional machine learning techniques such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforced learning. And, it ensures a secure, customized AI environment, as well as seamless data integration across on-premise, cloud and edge. 

The combination of OpenShift AI with Intel's comprehensive portfolio of AI-optimized hardware and software provides the compute power and scalability needed to support ever-growing AI workloads, enhancing the effective use of AI across industries. It includes:

• The Intel® Xeon® 6 processor, designed for diverse power, performance and efficiency requirements.
• Intel® Gaudi® AI accelerators, designed to bring a new level of productivity advantages and choice to data center generative Al.
• Open-source software for a flexible alternative to proprietary systems. Avoid vendor lock-in with technologies already embedded into Red Hat, including Intel® OpenVINO and Intel® oneAPI – software tools that reduce development time and enable fast deployment.

This integrated stack provides a consistently performant, AI-optimized solution from on-prem to datacenter and cloud that infrastructure teams can manage and scale with ease.

Optimize your solution with WWT and the AI Proving Ground

Red Hat and Intel provide the essential technology, but WWT brings it all together for customers with our comprehensive approach to AI, encompassing:

• Specialized expertise, with a team of ATC experts skilled in all aspects of AI as well as Red Hat and Intel. We assemble the right team to guide your solution and explore all options including adapting industry-specific models to your environment.
• End-to-end planning from proof of concept to production that incorporates all aspects of AI solution design including identifying goals, finance considerations, necessary skillsets, timelines and phases, hardware and software to optimize performance and efficiencies. Our approach focuses on right-sizing the solution for each customer, and future-proofing it. We start small, test and learn, refine and grow. 
• Validation of stack components in WWT's AI Proving Ground, where customers enjoy unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to explore, test, train and implement AI solutions. The AIPG is powered by WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC), our multi-campus R&D center of excellence where each customer's use case scenario comes together.
• Labs that enable customers to build skills by exploring various technologies and use case models.
• Lifecycle support with unwavering attention to new technologies in the ever-evolving world of AI, and how they can benefit our customers. As their needs change, WWT is there to help them stay competitive for the long term.

Learn how this new integrated AI solution and WWT can move you forward

AI is a critical factor in nearly every organization's growth strategy, and implementing the right infrastructure to support it is critical.

Simplify your path to AI with the advantages offered by OpenShift AI, powered by Intel technologies. WWT can help you deploy the right balance so that data engineers and IT staff can access and function with ease, in the right infrastructure for your use case.

Take the first step: contact WWT to consult with our AI experts, attend a lab, view a demo, and see how the integrated solution stack from Red Hat and Intel can supercharge your organization's AI strategy.