How A Private Cloud For AI Can Accelerate Your Success

Ask pretty much any business whether it wants to do more with artificial intelligence (AI), and the answer will be a resounding ‘yes’. More than nine out of 10 companies, in fact, say they’ll be upping their spend on AI.

Of course, more money is just part of the story. Turning this extra cash into business value requires flexible technology foundations. Businesses need to be able to innovate at pace, spinning up prototypes and proofs of concept (POCs) before scaling the successful initiatives to become part of business as usual.

However, laying the groundwork to support immediate AI productivity and long-term usage isn’t simple. It’s one of the reasons why many AI projects never make it to production. We go into more detail on this and other common AI challenges in our blog about ensuring your next AI initiative is a success, not an unwanted statistic.

Typical obstacles to AI success include limited compute resource, data management headaches, compliance, skills shortages, and cost. It’s to address challenges such as these that many organisations are now asking CDW to implement private cloud solutions for their AI projects, based on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Private Cloud AI. So today, let’s look at what this platform offers, and how it can support and accelerate your immediate and longer-term AI goals.

The need to self-host selected AI workloads

Many will initially look to the public cloud when considering how to build foundations for AI innovation. However, for a variety of reasons, not every AI workload can live in the public cloud. If this applies to you, then you’re looking at self-hosting. But designing, building, integrating, and maintaining your own platform for AI innovation adds significant upfront and ongoing overhead. HPE Private Cloud AI offers an all-around better way of self-hosting AI solutions – because the heavy-lift has been done for you.

By packaging together AI services, infrastructure, software, and models from HPE, NVIDIA and third parties, Private Cloud AI offers a turnkey AI platform that can be installed, verified and operational within days of arriving on site. It blends the advantages of public cloud – such as flexibility, scalability, and access to best-in-class AI development software – with full control over where your data and workloads reside.

Start small – and fast

Access to development tools such as NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NIM microservices, as well as powerful NVIDIA GPUs and a variety of AI models, gives application developers using HPE Private Cloud AI the foundations and tools they need to innovate at pace from day one. Flexible CapEx or OpEx pricing models are available to support innovation in different scenarios.

So, whether you work for a large enterprise, an ambitious scale-up, or in the public sector, the platform equips your teams to develop advanced predictive or generative AI applications, with capabilities such as inference or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Customers also use it to train small models or fine-tune existing ones. Typical business use cases include process automation, virtual assistants, AI-driven product development, and content creation.

Scaling out successful pilots is then straightforward, with infrastructure already in place to support the demands of a production-class workload – thanks in part to CDW’s strategic upfront planning. Moreover, enterprise-grade control and full visibility into utilisation and costs mean you’ll enjoy priceless peace of mind around budgets, even as AI use grows.

Better ways to manage data

Some of the biggest challenges around AI centre on data, whether that’s around governance, security, residency, or ethics. As we touched on above, HPE Private Cloud AI can be deployed in a location of your choice. It’s also designed to provide unified access to the enterprise data your AI models will rely on, using HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric. This provides a unified way to integrate, organise and govern enterprise data, so that it can be accessed from anywhere, by authorised users and applications.

Backed by holistic strategies and delivery plans

This type of tooling is key in implementing your AI data governance strategy, which CDW specialists will help you create as part of our upfront strategic work together. We liaise with your key people to identify where your business would benefit from predictive and/or generative AI, build business cases, and set out delivery plans. Moreover, based on your goals and your unique environment, our data team will help you navigate the web of ethics and compliance issues. This will give you the confidence to proceed with AI, knowing you’re using the technology securely and responsibly.

With the right strategy, delivery plan, and governance in place, our solution teams will architect and configure your HPE Private Cloud AI environment in partnership with colleagues at HPE and NVIDIA. By doing the strategic groundwork first, you can be fully confident that your HPE Private Cloud AI platform will be the right fit today and capable of supporting your long-term use of AI.

Come and try HPE Private Cloud AI for yourself

So, are you one of the 90% of organisations increasing their spending on AI? And are you looking to equip your development teams with cloud-style benefits to innovate in AI, but can’t use the public cloud?

To get started, why not book a demo of CDW’s HPE Private Cloud AI UK showcase and experience it for yourself, guided by our specialist team? Contact us today to arrange your session.