California-based hybrid multi-cloud computing firm Nutanix has announced GPT-in-a-Box for those looking to jump-start artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation.

The offering is a full-stack software-defined AI-ready platform, along with services to help organisations size and configure hardware and software infrastructure suitable to deploy a curated set of large language models (LLMs) using open-source AI and MLOps frameworks on the Nutanix cloud platform.

Users can procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), including LLMs at the edge or in their data centre.

Many enterprises are grappling with how to take advantage quickly, efficiently and securely of the power of generative AI and ML applications, especially for use cases that cannot be run in the public cloud because of data sovereignty, governance and privacy concerns. New use cases emerge every day as organisations look to leverage generative AI to improve customer service, developer productivity, operational efficiency and more.

From automated transcription of internal documents, to high-speed search of multimedia contents, and automated analysis, many organisations see the opportunity with AI but are struggling with growing concerns regarding intellectual property leakage, compliance and privacy. Additionally, organisations looking to build an AI-ready stack often struggle with how to support ML administrators and data scientists, while the prospect of large AI investment costs has enterprises stalled in their AI and ML strategy.

“As customers look to design and deploy generative AI, they find themselves struggling with balancing the deep expertise required to install, configure and run these workloads with concerns around their data security and protecting company IP, all while controlling costs,” said Greg Macatee, senior research analyst at IDC. “With GPT-in-a-Box, Nutanix offers customers a turnkey, easy-to-use option for their AI use cases, offering enterprises struggling with generative AI adoption an easier on-ramp to deployment.”

GPT-in-a-Box delivers ready-to-use user-controlled AI infrastructure for the edge or the core data centre and allows users to run and fine-tune AI and GPT models while maintaining control over their data. Nutanix provides a full complement of security and data protection offerings suitable for AI data protection.

“Helping customers tackle the biggest challenges they face in IT is at the core of what we do, from managing increasing multi-cloud complexity, to data protection challenges, and now adoption of generative AI while keeping control over data privacy and compliance,” said Thomas Cornely, senior vice president at Nutanix. “Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box is an opinionated AI-ready stack that aims to solve the key challenges with generative AI adoption and help jump-start AI innovation.”

It includes the Nutanix cloud infrastructure platform, with files storage and objects storage options, the firm’s AHV hypervisor and kubernetes, along with Nvidia GPU acceleration, which can be sized for large to small scale.

Nutanix services can help users size their cluster and deploy an opinionated stack with open-source deep learning and MLOps frameworks, inference server, and a curated set of LLMs such as Llama2, Falcon and MPT.

Data scientists and ML administrators can immediately consume these models with their choice of applications, terminal UI or standard CLI.

The platform can also be leveraged to run other GPT models, as well as fine tune these models leveraging internal data, hosted on included Nutanix files or objects storage services.

“Leveraging AI to more efficiently and effectively help our customers is a top priority for us but, as a regulated financial services organisation, maintaining full control over our data is necessary,” said Jon Cosson, CISO at JM Finn. “The Nutanix cloud platform delivers the performance, flexibility and security required to safely deploy AI workloads.”

The GPT-In-a-Box builds on the full stack scalability, performance, resilience and ease of use for which the Nutanix cloud platform is known. Nutanix’s expertise with scalable infrastructure across public cloud, data centre and edge use cases delivers an environment to fine-tune and run AI applications while maintaining control over the data. In a recent survey, 78% of Nutanix customers indicated they were likely to run their AI and ML workloads on the Nutanix cloud platform.

www.nutanix.com