Navigating the AI Revolution as a Solution Provider

Productivity and Data Challenges Present Opportunity

In the evolving business landscape, organizations are relentlessly seeking ways to improve productivity, gain deeper insights from data, personalize end-user experiences and automate repetitive processes. As a result, many of your customers are likely hoping that integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help them master these challenges effectively.

And there’s no doubt, as a reseller, you do have a golden opportunity to help your customers identify applicable AI use cases and build a resilient infrastructure to help them navigate these challenges, while also unlocking a profitable new avenue for your own revenue growth.

Use Cases for AI Across Industries

• Retail: AI-driven analytics can enhance inventory management, optimize pricing strategies, and improve customer service with personalized recommendations, driving better customer satisfaction and sales.
• Healthcare: Predictive analytics and machine learning models can streamline diagnostics, optimize treatment plans, and improve patient outcomes, addressing critical healthcare challenges.
• Finance: By utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) that specialize in tax, accounting, cash flow, and more, AI can detect fraudulent transactions in real-time, automate trading strategies, and provide personalized financial advice to customers, enhancing security and customer trust.
• Manufacturing: Predictive maintenance using AI models can minimize downtime, optimize production schedules, and enhance supply chain efficiency, increasing operational effectiveness.
• Telecom: AI models can analyze datasets to anticipate and optimize network congestion, and to enhance resource allocation.
• Customer Service: AI chatbots and virtual assistants can handle routine inquiries, freeing up human agents to tackle more complex issues, improving response times and customer experience.
• Coding and Development: AI accelerates development cycles and optimizes code quality by leveraging advanced algorithms.

Given just a sample of these use cases above, it’s easy to be optimistic about the AI revolution and your potential to grow your customers’ businesses with AI solutions. The challenge lies in dodging the risks – like platform lock-in, confusing vendor offerings, questions around ethics – and understanding the right AI models for various industries, and the infrastructure needed to support AI workloads and meet business objectives successfully.

Understanding AI Workloads

AI workloads are essential to training, executing and maintaining artificial intelligence models, and they come in various types to accomplish different tasks, such as:

• Predictive Analytics and Forecasting: By training AI models on historical data, businesses can predict customer behavior, maintenance needs, and sales trends, providing valuable insights for decision-making.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): This technology enables chatbots and virtual assistants to understand and generate human-like responses, enhancing customer interactions and support.
• Anomaly Detection: AI models trained on common patterns can identify unusual events in data sets, useful for fraud detection, cybercrime activity monitoring, and pinpointing equipment malfunctions.
• Image and Video Recognition: AI can identify objects, activities, and scenes in images and videos. This is especially useful in healthcare for analyzing medical imaging and in security systems for facial recognition.
• Recommendation Algorithms: By analyzing past browsing and purchase behaviors, AI models can predict which products or services customers may need next, enhancing personalized marketing efforts.

Each of these AI workloads is intensive and requires robust and scalable infrastructure to adapt to diverse and fluctuating data sizes and data types and to deliver optimal performance. Ideally, to prevent failure, the optimal AI infrastructure needs:

• High Compute Power: AI models, especially deep learning models, need substantial computational resources to process vast amounts of data and perform complex calculations.
• Scalability: As AI application data grows, the data infrastructure must scale compute and storage independently to flexibly accommodate increasing data and model complexity, and to adapt to diverse and fluctuating data sizes, data types, and workloads.
• Storage Capacity: AI generates and processes large datasets, necessitating high-capacity, high density object storage solutions that are both reliable and accessible.
• Low Latency: For real-time AI applications, low-latency infrastructure ensures quick data processing and response times.

Building the Right AI Infrastructure

To meet these requirements for AI workloads, and keep data visible, compliant, secure and always available, the comprehensive infrastructure, or AI solution stack, should seamlessly integrate:

• GPUs and Accelerators: Essential for speeding up AI computations and reducing training times for models.
• High-Speed Networking: Ensures data moves quickly between storage and compute resources, minimizing bottlenecks.
• Flexible Storage Solutions: Including both on-premises and cloud-based options to handle different data types and volumes.
• AI-Optimized Software Stacks: Preconfigured software environments that simplify deploying and managing AI applications.
• Security: To support rigorous data governance and data protection, crucial for maintaining data integrity and compliance with regulatory standards.
• Unified Control Pane: For a seamless view and control across the stack, from object storage to switching to compute to software.

Introducing Hitachi HiQ with NVIDIA HGX^TM

The End-to-End Solution, Single-vendor AI-ready Infrastructure

Hitachi iQ with NVIDIA HGX is an end-to-end solution for high-performance computing and AI workloads. It enables you to provide accelerated integration based on proven foundations and validated reference configurations, making data center AI infrastructure simpler and faster for you to design, deploy and manage.

Unlike AI offerings from most other vendors, Hitachi iQ goes beyond offering disparate and basic integration and storage capabilities. With Hitachi iQ, you can deliver a fully integrated solution that enables your customer to leverage AI technology from day one with full confidence. Hitachi iQ provides unified access to data no matter where is resides and ensures data accuracy and lineage, security and traceability at any point for mission critical solutions.

Avoid the challenges of creating AI-ready systems from multiple vendors and performing the necessary integrations. Hitachi iQ with NVIDIA HGX is a comprehensive, AI solution stack that provides:

• Complete Stack: Seamless components in one Hitachi Vantara order, from AI software to GPU servers to networking to storage.
• Simplified Procurement: Streamlines the buying process, reducing complexity and administrative overhead.
• Integrated Solutions: Ensures all components work seamlessly together, minimizing compatibility issues and optimizing performance.
• Cost-Effective: Bundling all necessary components into one package results in cost savings compared to purchasing each piece separately.
• Ease of Installation: Simplifies deployment and setup, enabling you to quickly get your customers up and running with AI solutions.
• Comprehensive Support: A single point of contact for support and maintenance makes it easier to address any issues that arise.

We’ve made the components in Hitachi iQ with NVIDIA HGX simple for you to configure and order all in one convenient step on PQM. These can include the following:

• NVIDIA HGX™ H100 system: For maximum performance and scalability (up to 128 HGX nodes) in a modern, unified AI development solution.
• Nvidia DGX^TM BasePOD-certified Hitachi Content Software for File:  For the highest performance file services that leverage NVMe flash and also include integrated tiering to and from Hitachi Content Platform object storage, which excels in delivering high-performance object storage.
• Nvidia AI Enterprise software suites and Nvidia Network, complete with NVIDIA Base Command Manager^TM
• Hitachi Content Platform: For optimized costs, secure data, increased
• productivity and flexible, sustainable hybrid cloud.

If you need advice on how to configure an install,  your partner account manager can help you engage with the Hitachi IQ overlay team to assist your ordering process, or you can use our AI Discovery Service for Hitachi iQ, designed to help customers identify the most valuable AI use cases, assess their data readiness, determine ROI, and create a strategic roadmap for successful AI implementation.

Hitachi Vantara Is Empowering Our Partners to Lead the AI Revolution

AI is set to skyrocket, with some forecasts predicting its market value to soar to $151 billion by 2027, up from just $40.3 billion today. This explosive growth underscores the vast opportunities AI presents—whether it's streamlining processes, automating mundane tasks, driving innovation or delivering personalized services.

A 2023 McKinsey survey revealed that 66% of organizations are still only in the exploratory or pilot stages of AI adoption. This highlights a critical need for clear guidance from resellers on how to effectively advance AI initiatives.

Hitachi Vantara is committed to you helping bridge this gap for your customers. The landscape of AI can be daunting, filled with uncertainties about where to start, how to prioritize projects, and the best ways to implement them. But as our partner, you are in a prime position to guide your customers through the complexities of AI adoption. And we’re here to provide the expertise and support you need to navigate these challenges and harness the full potential of AI for your customers. From selecting the use cases and right AI models to building robust AI infrastructure with Hitachi iQ with NVIVIDA HGX, you can help your customers improve productivity, enhance data insights and automate processes. Together, let’s harness the power of AI to drive business growth and innovation.

Read more:

• Hitachi iQ with NVIDIA HGX Announcement
• Hitachi iQ Site on Hitachi Vantara
• Hitachi iQ Solution Page on the Partner Connect Portal