Enterprise AI

A walkway running between tall grey storage racks in a brightly lit data center hall.
What Is AI Infrastructure?
Ask five people what AI infrastructure means and you will get five answers, most of them about graphics cards. The hardware matters. It is also the part of the problem most organizations are least likely to get wrong, be...
Rolled architectural floor plans on a desk beside a pen, a scale rule and drafting tools.
Enterprise AI Infrastructure Architecture
A reference architecture is useful for one reason: it gives a group of people who own different parts of a system a shared picture to argue over. It is not a design. Any organization that adopts one unchanged has skipped...
Blue mountain ridges receding into the distance through separated layers of cloud.
Hybrid AI Infrastructure
Hybrid AI infrastructure is the outcome many organizations reach, even when it was not the architecture they expected. Workloads differ in their data, security, performance, availability and cost requirements, and buildi...
A black and white close view of a processor package mounted on a densely populated circuit board.
Do You Need GPUs for Enterprise AI?
This question is usually asked in the wrong order. It arrives as "how many GPUs do we need", which assumes the answer is more than zero, and it frequently is not. The honest sequence is: decide whether you are running mo...
A small gold and green processor die balanced on a black stand against a plain background.
What Is AI Inference Infrastructure?
Inference is the part of AI that runs constantly. Training happens rarely, if at all, in most enterprises. Inference happens every time somebody asks a question, and it is the workload the infrastructure has to be built ...
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AI Infrastructure Capacity Planning
Capacity planning for AI has an unusually high ratio of confident numbers to defensible ones. The reason is that the familiar unit, requests per second, does not describe the workload, and everything built on top of it i...
Colleagues review a data analytics and security protocol dashboard on a large interactive touchscreen in a modern office.
What Is Private Enterprise AI?
Private enterprise AI is an approach to using artificial intelligence in which an organization keeps control of the things that make AI risky: the data that goes into it, the identities allowed to use it, the systems it ...
IT professionals collaborating in a modern office, working at computers and whiteboards during a team strategy session.
Private AI vs Public AI
The question is usually posed as a choice between two products. It is really a choice about which risks an organization would rather carry, and it does not have one answer that survives across every kind of content a bus...
Glowing digital globe with interconnected network nodes representing global IT infrastructure and data connectivity.
On-Premises AI vs Cloud AI
Once an organization has decided it wants a controlled AI environment, the next question is where it should run. The available answers are not two, and the framing as on premises against cloud hides the ones most organiz...
Two IT professionals review source code on a laptop in front of large screens displaying code in a dark room.
How to Build a Private AI Environment
Most private AI projects fail in the same way. They begin with a model, acquire infrastructure, and arrive at the questions about data and identity late, when the answers are expensive. The order below is close to the re...