Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), which positions itself as a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has announced the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution for customers looking to jump-start their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation, while maintaining control over their data.

The new offering, available today, 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 the leading open source AI and MLOps frameworks on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. It allows customers to easily procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), including LLMs at the edge or in their data centre.

Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix.

Many enterprises are grappling with how to quickly, efficiently and securely take advantage of the power of generative AI and AI/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 the high-speed search of multimedia contents and automated analysis, many organisations see the opportunity with AI. Still, they 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 best 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 solutions, 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, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “With GPT-in-a-Box, Nutanix offers customers a turnkey, easy-to-use solution for their AI use cases, offering enterprises struggling with generative AI adoption an easier onramp to deployment.”

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution delivers ready-to-use customer-controlled AI infrastructure for the edge or the core data centre and allows customers 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 ideal 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 multicloud complexity, to data protection challenges, and now adoption of generative AI solutions while keeping control over data privacy and compliance,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management 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.”

This new solution includes:

• The industry-leading Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform, with the Nutanix Files Storage and Objects Storage solutions, the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and Kubernetes, along with NVIDIA GPU acceleration, which can be sized for large to small scale.
• Nutanix services to help customers size their cluster and deploy an opinionated stack with the leading open source deep learning and MLOps frameworks, inference server and a curated set of large language models such as Llama2, Falcon and MPT.
• The ability for data scientists and ML administrators to immediately consume these models with their choice of applications, enhanced 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 Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution builds on the full stack scalability, performance, resilience and ease of use that the Nutanix Cloud Platform is known for. Nutanix’s expertise with scalable infrastructure across public cloud, data centre and edge use cases delivers the ideal environment to fine-tune and run AI applications while maintaining control over the data. In fact, in a recent survey, 78% of Nutanix customers indicated that they were likely to run their AI/ML workloads on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

Nutanix's expertise and involvement in the open source AI community provide customers with a strong foundation on which to build their AI strategy. Key contributions include: participation in the MLCommons (AI standards) advisory board; co-founding and technical leadership in defining the ML Storage Benchmarks and Medicine Benchmarks; serving as a co-chair of the Kubeflow (MLOps) Training and AutoML working groups at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution is available to customers today. Customers looking to get started can find more information here.

Supporting quotes:

• "Red Hat is helping organisations across various industries to accelerate business and mission-critical initiatives through the development and deployment of AI-enabled applications in the hybrid cloud. With this launch, joint customers can take advantage of Red Hat OpenShift AI along with the Nutanix AI-ready stack to jump-start innovation on a consistent, scalable open source foundation while maintaining control over their data," said Sarwar Raza, Vice-President, Cloud Services at Red Hat.
• "Enterprises everywhere are looking to leverage the generative AI opportunity, but many, especially in regulated industries, are concerned with potential IP and data security issues. TCS has a long track record of embracing technology innovations in a secured manner to satisfy customer demand and enable them to focus on business outcomes. Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box, along with TCS Cognix, a future-ready service delivery platform, allows customers to realise the value of artificial intelligence and machine learning by providing service resiliency, business agility and enhanced customer experience to organisations," said Dinanath Kholkar, SVP and Global Head of Partner Ecosystems & Alliances at TCS.
• "Taking advantage of the potential of generative AI is one of the most significant opportunities available to global enterprises today, and finding the right partner to guide this journey is crucial. Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box, along with consulting and solutions from Hexaware, can help jump-start this AI journey by addressing some of the key talent, security, compliance, deployment and scale challenges they're facing today," said Vinod Chandran, COO at Hexaware.
• "Generative AI is top of mind for many enterprises, but most don't have the in-house resources to fully take advantage of this opportunity. Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box, along with solutions from DKube, simplifies enterprise AI adoption with an AI-ready stack to jump-start innovation," said Prasad Vellanki, CEO at DKube.

Additional resources:

• The AI-Ready Stack: Nutanix Simplifies Your AI Innovation Learning Curve
• Nutanix AI Solution
• Kubeflow brings MLOps to the CNCF Incubator
• Announcing MedPerf Open Benchmarking Platform for Medical AI
• Debojyoti Dutta, Board Advisor, ML Commons