Partners See NVIDIA AI Computing By HPE As A GenAI Infrastructure 'Game-Changer'

by Steven Burke, CRN

Hewlett Packard Enterprise partners said the NVIDIA AI Computing By HPE collaboration raises the bar in the battle to develop the deepest enterprise generative AI integration and go-to-market model with AI superstar NVIDIA.

"NVIDIA is the 800-pound gorilla, setting the pace and the innovation for AI for the industry so HPE taking a leadership role with an as-a-service offering built in partnership with NVIDIA is a game-changer," said Mike Vencel, president of Comport Consulting, Ramsey, N.J., which has invested heavily in the AI market over the past eight years with both NVIDIA and HPE. "It's incredibly important that HPE has developed some unique IP with NVIDIA and turned this into a fast route for clients to get productive with AI. It's a huge deal."

The first ever co-developed, co-branded and joint go-to-market model for HPE, including a turnkey private cloud with NVIDIA—HPE Private Cloud AI—aims to go much deeper with GenAI compute, storage and networking infrastructure integration with NVIDIA than rivals Dell Technologies and Cisco Systems.

The keynote address Tuesday at the Sphere featuring NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on stage with HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri speaks volumes about the tight relationship between the two companies, said Vencel. He credited Neri for making the deep AI investments at a "pace that far exceeds" competitors, setting HPE and its partners up for success in the AI solutions market.

Neil Anderson, vice president of cloud infrastructure and AI for World Wide Technology, the $20 billion St. Louis-based solution provider behemoth that is investing $500 million in its AI Proving Ground, said he expects the Nvidia AI Computing By HPE offering to double or triple his HPE AI business over the next several years. "We're very excited about the [HPE-Nvidia] announcement," he said. "We believe there is going to be a ton of market opportunity for private cloud AI workloads."

HPE and Nvidia are simplifying the complex integration that comes with creating a private cloud AI solution from servers and high-speed networking and storage to GPUs and the AI software stack, said Anderson.

"The fact that someone like HPE can step into this and create a prepackaged solution where they have preintegrated those components removes the complexity of specifying it, choosing the technologies, building as well as operating it from the cloud with GreenLake," he said. "We're excited because we see substantial opportunity for these kinds of preintegrated and prevalidated solutions. This kind of move is just going to accelerate our customers' ability to adopt AI. It gets AI out of the PowerPoint concept to let's actually do something."