The News: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announces super commuting hardware as-a-Service model to deliver AI workloads as a cloud. For full details of the announcement, click here.
HPE Enters the Era of AI With New Cloud Service
Analyst Take: HPE took the opportunity in its annual Discover event this week to unveil HPE Greenlake for Large Language Models (LLMs), as a service offering. In perhaps the most unsurprising but significant announcement for HPE, this AI service is providing bulk access to NVIDIA H100 GPUs and data science tools curated by its High Performance Computing (HPC) division.
The introduction of HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models enables enterprises to privately gain access to the ability to train, tune, and deploy AI at scale and addressing the environment in a highly sustainable manner. HPE is leveraging its considerable experience in the HPC market, where it is credited with some of the world’s largest supercomputers and a history of innovation.
The announcement is, according to the company, the first in a series of industry and domain-specific AI applications that HPE plans to bring to market. Initial use cases and potential deployment scenarios where HPE is focusing include support for climate modeling, healthcare and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and transportation.
Architectural Approach
Citing the issues of performance, data management, and security along with the reliability of job completion, this move is designed to differentiate the new service from the more general-purpose cloud offerings where multiple workloads run in parallel. Performance and reliability of job completion is of concern by data scientists. HPE’s historical expertise will likely bring a higher trusted system and availability, compared to general purpose offerings. HPE is also deploying a model where nodes are single tenant, creating a more trusted environment for critical data. It will enable clients to run a single large-scale AI training and simulation workload, and at full computing capacity without having to share the underlying GPU layer.
Eliminating egress fees is a value point. And the use of a multitude of bring your own tools, or tools provided by their cloud, addresses ease-of-use for the scientists.
One key area that HPE stressed in the closed-door sessions was the software stack, although details were limited. This will be crucial for HPE to get traction, as raw GPU access will not be where this market lands. We will be looking for more clarity on the software stack in future briefings.
It is unclear from the announcement exactly how many NVDIA H100s HPE has gained access to but in the release it quotes “hundreds or thousands of CPUs or GPUs”. We fully expect this service to be close to the front of the line when it comes to access to H100s, although we would have liked more clarity on the volumes. Access to H100s and for that matter A100s is a key concern for enterprise buyers as they look to roll out enterprise AI projects.
Who Are Aleph Alpha?
Antonio Neri brought the CEO of Aleph Alpha to stage as part of his keynote to announce the new service. Aleph Alpha is a European AI-focused company based in Germany. The company’s solutions will help streamline model development using its pretrained models. A key element of the solution is that it works in multiple European languages and is culturally sensitive to European cultures and norms. This will be crucial as Europe is gearing up to heavily regulate AI, based on early statements.
Looking Ahead
Antonio Neri shared in the closed-door analyst briefing that he sees the AI solutions as significant to the overall performance of HPE because it expands the company’s total addressable market (TAM).
One other element that will become crucial as AI reaches scale in the enterprise is the sustainability of the service. HPE has taken this into account with initial deployment being in the Qscale site in Quebec, Canada. HPE is focused on delivering a sustainable baseline for proving an AI cloud capability and made a connection to the sustainability dashboard that we covered a couple of weeks ago. Sustainability will be crucial going forward for AI as the GPUs are power hungry and will surely garner attention as deployments ramp up.
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.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
HPE offers Cray supercomputer cloud service for AI models – Tech Target
HPE Expands Alletra Storage Portfolio to Transform File, Block, and Data Protection Services
The Cost of The Next Big Thing – Artificial Intelligence
Author Information
Now retired, Camberley brought over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
Steven engages with the world’s largest technology brands to explore new operating models and how they drive innovation and competitive edge.
