AI is increasing pressure on IT
In the AI era, businesses need more power and high-performance computing to innovate faster – this while facing tighter IT budgets, higher energy costs and taking into consideration sustainability goals. There has never been more pressure on IT leaders to effect transformation faster and better than competition, and that pressure comes with scrutiny and a significant price tag.
The imperative for enterprises to pursue AI agendas has increased demand for advanced GPUs, with correlated expense and lengthy, difficult procurement. As AI initiatives are increasing, so is the scarcity of skilled labor and appropriate cloud infrastructure, while businesses face challenges with aging data centers, business agility, rising costs and complexity in managing IT.
Results of a CIO survey conducted by Lenovo earlier this year are not surprising: only 34% of IT leaders say their computing infrastructure is AI ready; this while a recent range of lead-times for AI-ready GPU extends to as many as 11 months.
New aaS solution helps maximize GPU utilization
A critical key to success for businesses implementing AI is maximizing utilization of GPU resources. To this end, Lenovo TruScale GPUaaS enables the sharing of GPU resources and metered usage, for controlling costs and increasing GPU availability. The fully managed AI-ready solution enables predictable billing and flexible use, and provides a cost-effective alternative to public cloud with high performance, reliability, and management flexibility for organizations with demanding GPU needs.
To maximize GPU utilization, and the need to parse compute availability to even minutes (or less), legacy workload scheduler approaches are now insufficient due to software stacks becoming increasingly more complex and a range of tools that need to be integrated. To allocate and meter more efficiently, Lenovo has leveraged its deep understanding of technology usage patterns and has integrated its unique Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) software to schedule, deploy, monitor and manage AI workloads, eliminating complexity for non-technical users. LiCO enables insights to increase productivity and maximize utilization. TruScale GPUaaS is a fully-managed solution that helps with cost control as a “pay-as-you-go” consumption model; it allows organizations to scale up/scale down as needed and supports multiple separate organizations to maximize resource utilization. The solution may be deployed as on-prem or in a colocation. Lenovo engineers provide expert guidance, execute tailored installations, and offer ongoing support to maintain performance and address any operational challenges.
Power and cooling services for efficiency
Data centers frequently face challenges with high energy consumption and inefficient monitoring, leading to increased costs and environmental impact. Lenovo’s Power and Cooling services team can help organizations better utilize energy consumption and help support organizations’ sustainability goals in the data center.
A key solution is new 6th-Gen Lenovo Neptune water-cooling, with the continued design of zero fans, which enables customers to achieve up to a 40% reduction in power consumption and a 3.5x improvement in thermal efficiencies compared to traditional air-cooled systems. In addition, 98% of all heat will be transferred to the water loop, allowing customers to run high-density server racks.
Lenovo helping customers
“Al Hathboor sees this collaboration as a way to give the UAE a technological advantage to the innovation ecosystem, create jobs and opportunities for our youth, and develop tech for solving regional and global challenges.”
– Mohammed Al Hathboor, Management Committee Member, Al Hathboor Bikal.ai (Research Institute, UAE – TruScale-enabled AI customer)
“The Mass Open Cloud Alliance (MOC A) recently entered a partnership with Lenovo whereby the company’s GPU nodes will be made available as an additional service offering to MOC A members. This creative collaboration offers use of the GPUs on an hourly basis and is a great way to meet our members’ needs for GPU access and the performance of AI tasks. We’re grateful to Lenovo for working with us to think outside the box.”
– Jon Stumpf, Business Liaison Director, Mass Open Cloud (Education, USA – TruScale GPUaaS and Neptune liquid cooling)
New ways forward
As AI becomes increasingly widespread, it’s critical for businesses to understand that adoption presents new considerations and challenges. At the same time, new solutions and services have become available that directly address: compute resources and maximizing utilization and availability; building in scale (both up and down) given the expense of these systems and operation; minimizing complexity while maximizing efficiency; new services and solutions to address power and cooling considerations (need to increase efficiency and considering sustainability goals). In partnership with Lenovo, our customers are advancing their AI journeys and deploying a range of solutions and services that are driving success.
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