The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is reshaping the enterprise landscape. As organizations face growing pressure to adopt scalable AI solutions, Dell AI Factory offers an integrated approach intended to meet these demands, as announced at this week’s SC24 event.

This new era poses challenges for businesses, which must balance budget constraints alongside demands to innovate. As theCUBE has written about extensively, enterprises seek a deeper AI value.

“Enterprises are fighting a dual mandate of operating inside a tight information technology budget envelope while at the same time transforming their organization into an AI-first company,” wrote theCUBE Research co-founder and Chief Analyst Dave Vellante in a recent edition of his Breaking Analysis series. “Navigating macroeconomic headwinds while driving innovation is an exciting challenge for IT decision-makers.”

Those challenges have led many organizations to actively search for solutions that simplify AI integration while supporting broader business objects. Included in the mix is Dell Technologies Inc. and Dell AI Factory, which is intended to meet the growing demand for integrated AI solutions by offering what the company says is access to the industry’s broadest AI portfolio. In today’s era, data centers have to be designed from the ground up to handle AI’s speed and scale while new AI PCs are transforming productivity and collaboration, according to Jeff Clark, vice chairman and chief operating officer of Dell.

“What’s needed are new IT infrastructure and devices purpose-built to meet the specific demands of AI. The Dell AI Factory helps customers accelerate AI adoption with the world’s broadest AI portfolio and leading AI ecosystem partners, offering right-sized approaches and greater control over AI deployments on-premises, at the edge and across cloud environments,” Clark recently said.

Dell says its AI Factory initiative aims to equip enterprises with the capabilities to integrate AI across their operations and drive digital transformation. Given the rapidly evolving nature of enterprise AI, it’s worth examining what’s on offer from the company and what might come next.

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s exploration of Dell’s efforts in enterprise AI. Be sure to watch theCUBE’s analyst-led coverage of SC24 from November 19-21. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell AI Factory intended to be end-to-end AI solution

In breaking news from today’s SC24 event, Dell announced that it expanded AI Factory with new high-powered servers and dense racks. The updates include the PowerEdge XE9685L and XE7740 servers, designed for high-density AI and HPC workloads, with support for advanced Nvidia and Intel processors and GPUs. Dell is also enhancing its AI Factory, Data Lakehouse and professional services to streamline AI adoption and improve performance for enterprise applications. Check out the breaking news on siliconangle.com.

Going back to earlier this year, Dell announced it was expanding its infrastructure portfolio with new Nvidia Corp.-powered AI platforms. At the time, Dell said its AI Factory was intended to be an “end-to-end AI enterprise solution” for training, tuning and running AI models, combining Nvidia chips with products from Dell’s compute, storage, client device and software portfolios, as well as professional services.

Those services, the company said, were intended to ease tasks, such as preparing AI datasets. In April, more detail was provided by Scott Bils, vice president of gen AI professional services at Dell. Dell AI Factory is intended to be an end-to-end solution for enterprises, providing them with an “easy button” for AI. It brings the breadth of Dell infrastructure and hardware: “Compute, storage, networking, workstations … plus Nvidia AI infrastructure and their software stacks, including the new MIM microservices software that they’ll be bringing to market,” Bils said during an interview with theCUBE.

It also involves a combination of Dell and Nvidia professional services. That’s intended to provide a turnkey solution, he added: “To help them address their biggest challenges, their most complex issues around adopting AI use cases, and driving those into operations and production.”

The solution combines Dell’s compute, storage and security capabilities with Nvidia’s AI infrastructure, intended to offer businesses a comprehensive, end-to-end system to accelerate business transformation and boost productivity. The fully-integrated solution is intended to take advantage of rack-level design, while utilizing rigorous testing and validation to transform data into valuable insights and outcomes, according to the company.

“This solution also leverages existing offerings in enterprise data security with accompanying Dell services offerings in security and privacy,” the company said in a recent release. “The Dell AI Factory with Nvidia supports a wide array of AI use cases and applications to support the entire gen AI lifecycle, from model creation and tuning to augmentation and inferencing.”

Customers can also take advantage of enterprise-grade professional services, the company said. It also stated that Dell AI Factory is available via traditional channels and Dell APEX.

Data and partnerships

The Dell AI Factory also intends to draw on the “raw material” of customer data. Despite that, the company notes that the success of any AI initiative depends on the quality of the data used.

“The Dell AI Factory brings AI as close as possible to where data resides to minimize latency, lower costs and maintain data security by keeping sensitive information within a controlled environment,” the company wrote in a recent blog. “It also provides a way to prepare this data for use by the AI factory, ensuring that customers are working with quality and accurate data, with easy access and built-in data governance.”

The Dell AI Factory promises to simplify AI adoption with an all-in-one infrastructure package, aiming to deliver on the complex needs of modern enterprises. With that in mind, the company has sought to highlight its partnership with Nvidia, which it claims can simplify development, automate workflows and deliver up to 86% faster business outcomes.

“Dell Technologies and Nvidia have a long-standing partnership with over 25 years of joint innovation, focused on accelerating innovation and delivering cutting-edge platforms, solutions and software that enable transformative results for our joint customers,” the company wrote of the partnership in May.

It also outlined another partnership deal aimed at AI development in recent months. A deal with Hugging Face Inc. is intended to set up a development hub on Hugging Face’s development platform, with an eye towards enabling organizations to train and deploy open customized large language models on-prem on Dell infrastructure.

“Dell will be Hugging Face’s preferred on-prem infrastructure provider to support enterprise adoption of tailored open-source gen AI data sets, libraries and models,” said Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing for Dell’s infrastructure solutions group, in May.

An eye toward redefining enterprise AI

With an eye toward redefining enterprise AI, Dell has positioned its AI Factory as an all-in-one solution to help enterprises overcome the complexities of AI adoption. The company says its partnerships with Nvidia and Hugging Face can help it get there.

As CEO Michael Dell explained at Dell Technology World 2024, the goal is to bring AI to the data and leverage factories to convert data to intelligence for a business. Its strategy is clear, according to Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research.

“To accelerate the building of these AI factories, Dell and its partner ecosystem will provide all the infrastructure and services required to build these on-premises environments. This includes high-performance servers, GPUs, networking, storage, and even AI-enabled PCs,” Laliberte wrote in May.

In this new era, organizations must embark on AI initiatives to remain competitive, but the barrier to entry is high, as most companies need more skills and knowledge of where to start, according to Laliberte. Dell is looking to change that with its end-to-end solutions and in helping to focus organizations on outcomes that they desire.

“Dell customers even have access to a free AI accelerator workshop to help them get started. The most crucial step is the first: Organizations must dedicate the time and resources to understand how AI can help their business,” Laliberte said. “Dell wants to help accelerate the time to create your own AI Factory, leveraging its own and ecosystem partner solutions.”

It’s clear that Dell’s AI Factory reflects a company goal to make AI adoption achievable for enterprises. With such a priority reflected across the enterprise, this week’s SC24 announcements are showing how Dell’s solution is driving impactful results.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SC24. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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