Artificial intelligence is the name of today’s enterprise game. At the recent HPE Discover event, there was a more conscientious approach to AI innovation, balancing improvements in sustainability and ethics alongside technical novelties such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s Private Cloud AI.

“Jensen [Huang] came on and was excited about how far and how complete I think the solution was by HPE,” said Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research. “I think part of it was that the HPE Private Cloud AI is all the way integrated into the GreenLake platform already. They went through a good demo in [Satya] Nadella’s keynote the next day. What was really interesting also in that whole keynote was that they’re bringing all of the stack pieces together, not just the compute.”

Strechay spoke with fellow analyst Bob Laliberte during an AnalystANGLE segment recapping HPE Discover 2024. They discussed signals from the show as they painted a picture of HPE’s technological chops and strategic foresight in addressing the challenges and opportunities of the AI age.

Private Cloud AI: Simplifying enterprise deployment

In a head-turner of a keynote, the stage was shared by Antonio Neri, HPE’s chief executive officer, and Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang. Two key announcements followed: the introduction of HPE Private Cloud AI and Nvidia AI Computing by HPE, both of which are integrated into HPE’s GreenLake platform. These solutions aim to simplify AI deployment for enterprises, making advanced AI accessible with just a few clicks.

“The nice part about the Private Cloud for AI is sort of like the easy button for organizations that want to get into AI and deploy solutions,” Laliberte said. “I think they were really trying hard to simplify the purchasing through GreenLake, the deployment by having everything preconfigured and then operationally — in addition to having all the tight integration around the compute and the servers and the storage and the GPUs and so forth — they also added OpsRamp, which gave that end-to-end observability down to the GPUs.”

HPE’s Private Cloud AI has preconfigured options in various sizes (small, medium, large and extra-large), all with liquid cooling options and tight integration across the entire AI stack. For more intensive modeling, training and inferencing use cases, Nvidia AI Computing by HPE leverages HPE’s Apollo line of servers and storage solutions, such as Alletra MP, complemented by Nvidia’s high-performance GPUs and networking stack, including NeMo and InfiniBand.

“From a networking perspective, from my point of view, it’s really something that’s going to evolve,” Laliberte said. “The data lake may evolve, because I think once the Juniper acquisition comes through — and Juniper has a lot of great tools for networking for AI — I think you’ll see that Private Cloud AI will probably be infused with some Juniper technology. You’ll have an option, do you want to go with Juniper technology or do you want to use the Nvidia, either InfiniBand or Ethernet?”

The Juniper Networks Inc. acquisition will allow HPE to leverage Mist and enable robust options for private 5G and distributed services natively within its stack, Strechay added.

Sustainability and ethics in AI

In the backdrop of ever-growing resource demands from AIOps, sustainability was a recurrent theme throughout the event. HPE’s expertise and continuous improvement of liquid cooling will be crucial to reducing the power consumption and heat generation of AI environments, according to Laliberte.

“They get this space, they know how to handle it, they’ve got options for liquid cooling, they’ve got patents, they’ve got the manufacturing to support the scale of liquid computing,” he said. “I think it’s something you’re going to be hearing more and more about as organizations try and grasp how to best power up these AI environments and how to potentially reduce the cost of powering them through liquid cooling and enhance the performance as well.”

The sustainability dashboard, part of the GreenLake platform, is another valuable initiative. It offers real-time insights into the carbon footprint of IT operations, helping organizations meet their environmental goals, according to Strechay.

“I don’t think they get enough credit for how they’ve brought the GreenLake platform together over the last three years,” he said. “One of the things they announced last year at Discover, and they were highlighting it again, was the sustainability dashboard, which I thought was really interesting in where they’re taking it.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete AnalystANGLE segment with Rob Strechay and Bob Laliberte:

Image: PhonlamaiPhoto/Canva