Insight announcements Insight Makes AI Building Blocks a Breeze with New AI Infrastructure as a Service
By Juan Orlandini / 23 Sep 2024
The cloud offers great flexibility, but it doesn’t always suit what organizations need to scale artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, across their business.
Here’s the rub: AI initiatives frequently face uncertainty and a disconnect between available resources and a company’s data. Questions loom large about project viability. These include: determining whether a new approach requires more or less compute, if needs will change as the approach evolves, and how multiple projects running concurrently will be managed.
Most commercial AI tools and services are cloud-based. Yet, 82% of IT decision makers prefer an on-premises or hybrid AI model since that’s where their essential data lives. This leads a lot of organizations down a path where they develop a good generative AI proof of concept. However, demonstrating its value typically falls short, as they struggle with the costs and complexities of expanding it across their entire enterprise.
Fortunately, Insight’s AI Infrastructure as a Service (AI-IaaS) pioneers a new industry paradigm in AI implementation. We’re introducing unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency to organizations stuck between a great idea for generative AI and effectively demonstrating and scaling its transformative potential as a business catalyst.
What is Insight AI Infrastructure as a Service?
Insight’s answer to providing the critical components to implementing AI across your enterprise. Along with our deep Data and AI expertise, we rely on our best-in-class technology partnerships to wrap your compute, networking, and storage requirements under a single as-a-service umbrella. This brings AI to where your data lives: in the cloud, on-premises, or a hybrid state. You get greater financial flexibility through an OpEx, public cloud-like consumption model… and a single service point of contact for infrastructure from leading data-management providers like Cisco+ and NetApp, rolled out to you as an on-premises service.
Our solution addresses the uncertainties of AI by offering a flexible consumption model that removes the need for clients to design and fund their AI infrastructure from scratch. We provide a comprehensive, opinionated offering to best address the compute, networking, and storage requirements. Also baked in is the option for managed services to operate the infrastructure, if desired. This enables our clients to focus on identifying the business value in their AI initiatives and easily scale them when successful. And in case they encounter difficulties, our team is on hand to provide guidance and support.
A Simple Solution for a Hybrid World
As interest in generative AI abounds, new research by Insight in partnership with Foundry reveals that 46% of IT leaders are reverting to repatriating some of their public cloud workloads to an on-premises or hybrid cloud environment. Yet almost all (96%) utilize one or more as-a-service solution, such as Infrastructure as a Service (81%) and Storage as a Service (63%).
Companies want the public-cloud benefits — including rapid application deployment and resource elasticity based on demand — while also ensuring control, visibility, and security over on-premises storage as they explore AI initiatives.
But hybrid-cloud environments pose challenges in designing, architecting, and managing generative AI. Hurdles include:
- Integrating diverse systems
- Technical debt from aging infrastructure that restricts data access and throttles innovation
- Escalating or uncontrolled cloud costs
- The expensive lift of migrating and refactoring from the data center to the cloud
These challenges emphasize the essential need for a holistic solution like Insight’s that caters to distinct compute, networking, and storage requirements — enabling businesses to effectively leverage the full potential of AI.
Keith Norbie, CTO of NetApp’s Worldwide Partner Solutions, shares how a singular service like our AI-IaaS model and our overall Solutions Integrator expertise helps: “Insight is the model partner for NetApp in the age of AI, offering clients solutions that reduce time to market, lower costs, and optimize data for AI model training and inferencing. Together, we empower organizations to innovate at scale, driving digital transformation with an intelligent data fabric that seamlessly integrates on-premises and cloud environments.”
Bringing AI to Your Data — Not the Other Way Around
The cloud is a convenient place to access AI capabilities and the computing power of a GPU. But it’s not necessarily the best place to analyze data. Data has gravity and is difficult to move.
Put it this way: You can easily enjoy a world-class meal at a fine-dining restaurant with minimal effort, but it comes with a cost. On the other hand, if you are a decent cook, you can prepare a decent meal at home for less money and even have fun making it in the process. With practice, guidance, and experience, you might even rival those high-end restaurants.
Most of us opt for a mix of dining out and cooking at home, considering factors such as budget, how well equipped our kitchens and pantries are, cooking ability, flexibility, and convenience. Similarly, in technology, factors like data location, team expertise in providing AI tools and resources, operational efficiency, and adaptability to meet project deadlines and cost targets play a crucial role.
Extending that analogy, data is a key consideration. If yours is in a data center, it’s likely difficult to migrate. But the ability to bring AI to where your data lives can lead to more cost-effectively and efficiently extracting its value.
The core advantage of working with a Solutions Integrator like Insight is we bring the crucial components and services to you, taking away the heavy lifting of building all the necessary tooling. We’re the only ones who can bring it all together as a single service.
AI Ingredients on One Plate
Our strategic partnerships with industry leaders like NetApp, Cisco, NVIDIA, and others play a pivotal role in helping our clients innovate at scale in the age of AI.
By leveraging their expertise, technologies, and resources, Insight’s AI-IaaS solution tailors their most essential offerings into a holistic strategy to address your business’s specific challenges and requirements. Implementing generative AI as a flexible, cloud-like consumption model can help make sense of the many moving pieces and minimize the cost and resource variables. Scale up what works, toss the rest. Navigating the journey — from concept to implementation to the day-to-day management — is made even easier when coupled with our consultative and managed services for your data and AI.
The ingredients we serve up from our partners are Michelin-star quality.
Cutting-edge storage solutions, including NetApp’s Keystone storage-as-a-service solution and its FlexPod converged infrastructure solution, enable Insight to optimize data management for AI model training and inferencing. Our data-science consulting services further enhance the value proposition by providing expert guidance and support to efficiently deploy end-to-end AI stacks built on tools like these.
Stirring in Cisco+ compute and networking services with NetApp Keystone for storage is delivered as our FlexPod as a Service. Ultimately, Insight AI Infrastructure as a Service integrates it with our data and AI expertise, eliminating the need for clients to manage multiple contracts and components. This comprehensive solution streamlines AI infrastructure deployment, offering a seamless and hassle-free experience.
“Insight’s proven track record of converged infrastructure, along with their abilities to recognize how to leverage compute and networking as a cohesive solution, makes the power of three a natural fit in delivering outcomes,” says Mario Castro, Senior Director, AI and Cloud Infrastructure at Cisco. “We are excited that our synergies align here and are looking forward to building from that success for our clients’ next-generation compute needs. Now more than ever, they are looking for simple ways to consume, and Cisco+ and As-a-Service offers like Insight’s will make a huge impact in meeting their needs.”
Hoseb Dermanilian, Senior Director, Global Head of AI Sales & GTM at NetApp, adds: “As clients embark on their AI journeys, they are looking at efficient ways to deploy and operate their end-to-end AI stack while benefiting from the data-science consulting services that Insight provides. Utilizing NetApp Keystone, Insight removes the IT burdens of managing storage and eliminates lengthy, expensive procurement cycles. With a choice of operating models and flexible multiyear contracts, Keystone helps align storage costs to business needs and accelerate time to value.”
Additional Insight partnerships ensure that our clients have access to top-tier compute capabilities, including AI accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. By combining these state-of-the-art technologies with Insight’s industry expertise and data management services, leveraging AI for business intelligence becomes a strategic investment rather than a risk.
Every Company Values Flexibility
Beyond best-in-class AI infrastructure tools and services, clients can rely on Insight for a comprehensive range of IT consulting services to navigate the ideation phase of enterprise transformation and how to operationalize generative AI as the fabric of your business DNA.
We can transform the new generative AI capabilities into modern applications for both your workforce and customers, while also providing the organizational change management guidance to facilitate full adoption.
That’s the flexibility and range of services that every company values, from easing the financial bottom line to the ease of use of the technology and its scalability. That’s the full value of a Solutions Integrator — and if you’re looking for help on how to get started on AI initiatives or extract more value out of what you currently run, this provides a direct approach to simplifying your journey.
Not every company is built the same way. However, an integrated solution that meets the demand for dependable AI infrastructure unique to your needs, at a fraction of the cost of tackling it piece by piece, is attainable. Let us guide you — and your AI objectives — in the right direction: starting with where your data resides.
Juan Orlandini
Chief Technology Officer, North America and Distinguished Technologist, Insight
Juan is Insight’s chief technology officer, North America, and one of Insight’s distinguished technologists. He is a 30-plus-year veteran of the IT industry and has designed and deployed enterprise computing, storage, data protection, virtualization and hybrid cloud solutions. Juan evaluates next-generation technologies for Insight and works with enterprise clients, assisting them in architecting and selecting strategic roadmaps. In his current role, Juan designates champions of the technology community within Insight and drives events that promote thought leadership, professional development and knowledge sharing.
