The News: At KubeCon North America, Dell published the Dell Validated Design for Red Hat OpenShift AI on APEX Cloud Platform, showing how to build a digital assistant with customized business data. You can find more information in this Dell blog.

Dell-Red Hat Validated Design Focuses on AI

Analyst Take: The Validated Design comes weeks after Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift became available. Dell APEX Cloud Platform was jointly engineered by Dell and Red Hat and runs OpenShift on Dell PowerEdge Servers, PowerFlex-based software-defined storage, and Dell’s high performance, linearly scalable software-defined storage based on PowerFlex technology. APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software automates the OpenShift deployment.

The APEX platform for OpenShift is part of a collaboration that Dell and Red Hat first disclosed in September 2022 to bring OpenShift container technology into Dell’s storage as a service program.

The new Validated Design is a sample application for the APEX Cloud Platform for OpenShift that supports generative AI on the platform. It lets customers use AI for their on-premises data without moving it. This functionality is done by building a digital assistant customized with any organization’s data.

Dell has combined the Llama 2 large language model (LLM) with Dell documents to give users more accurate information for queries through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Users can add domain-specific content to a vector database to give users more accurate information to their queries. A series of open source operators makes it easy to replicate and alter the digital assistant’s design. OpenShift provides collaborative open source tools for building models that rely on public cloud-specific tools.

The Validated Design serves as a step-by-step guide to help a data scientist use LLM with RAG to build a digital assistant. Red Hat OpenShift AI provides open source tools and a platform for building models regardless of the infrastructure or underlying cloud. That helps businesses focus on outcomes rather than complicated tools.

KubeCon Themes: AI and Simplifying Kubernetes

The collaborative Validated Design covered two big themes of KubeCon. One, AI, is ubiquitous in the IT world this year, especially generative AI. The second — making Kubernetes simpler to manage — has been a KubeCon topic for years.

Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and a KubeCon keynote speaker, referred to cloud-native technologies as “the scaffolding for the AI movement.” She pointed out AI technologies such as OpenAI, Hugging Face, and others are built on Kubernetes.

At the same time, developers and business users seek to reduce the complexity that Kubernetes has historically brought. “Nobody has ever blamed us for being simple,” said another keynote speaker, Tim Hockin, a Google distinguished engineer who worked on Kubernetes before it was open source.

Traditional storage and infrastructure vendors are addressing these themes. Dell is collaborating with other undisclosed AI partners, and other storage vendors are working with OpenShift. IBM Storage Fusion is based on Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) container-native storage that transferred ownership from Red Hat to its parent IBM earlier this year. Another example is Nutanix, which is also embracing OpenShift and other Kubernetes platforms on its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform to run AI. This theme should become ongoing, however, and not just something that comes up twice a year at KubeCon shows.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.