Buenos dias from Barcelona! It's an overcast winter's morning here in Catalonia and we are gearing up for HPE CTO Fidelma Russo's keynote.
The conference hall is fairly empty at the moment, but it is starting to fill up.
While we wait for things to kick off why not catch up on some of ITPro's recent coverage of HPE's latest announcements.
• HPE partners with NVIDIA to accelerate AI model training
The hall is almost full now and we are set to get underway in five minutes, stay tuned!
Here we go, Fidelma Russo is on stage and kicking things off with some welcoming remarks
Today we are going to learn about some of the innovations in HPE's hybrid cloud portfolio and of course how HPE is playing a prominent role in supporting AI-native architectures through their GreenLake platform.
Russo is now describing how one HPE customer is leveraging GreenLake to embrace the much talked about AI transformation.
Russo welcomes head of technology and digitalisation at leading European food producer Bell Food Group, Valery Thomas.
Thomas describes how his company to uses edge computing within their factories and warehouses in order provide food products that arrive in the morning and need to be delivered on the same day.
Thomas describes how the hybrid cloud gives Bell Food Group the flexibility to allocate compute power where it needs it, i.e on the factory floor and in warehouses.
Thomas is now talking about how AI is enabling the company to predict when equipment outages may occur in an industry where downtime can significantly negatively impact the business' operations.
That's it for Valery Thomas, now Fidelma Russo is continuing to touch on artificial intelligence.
"It will disrupt nearly every industry", Russo says AI is already reshaping traditional business models and unlocks unprecedented opportunities for innovation.
Russo is talking about the versatility of genAI and its widespread applications.
"From the classroom to the boardroom, generative AI has democratized access to artificial intelligence"
Russo stresses AI is critically dependent on data and specifically it is a hybrid workload that needs to work on a hybrid infrastructure: enter GreenLake.
Russo highlights some of the top of mind questions around generative AI, concerning ethical and safe use of genAI, optimized infrastructure to run AI, and the software to man the AI lifecycle.
Russo is now discussing the AI lifecycle from model development, training the model, tuning, prompt engineering, and inference.
Each step in the lifecycle has different infrastructure and performance requirements, so businesses have a lot of choices to make.
Russo states the answer to what infrastructure is best for a company depends on where they are in the AI lifecycle.
Russo is covering some of the previous announcements from yesterday's keynote such as HPE GreenLake's File Storage for AI offering.
Now comes to running the AI models, and Russo welcomes a colleague who ran on stage so quickly I didn't catch his name! He is here to demonstrate how the GreenLake platform helps businesses with managing their AI deployments.
I have now ascertained this energetic gentleman is Denis Vilfort, director of business development at HPE, and he is demonstrating a teaser of Project Ethan, which will help organizations manage their AI models, from security, hardware, storage, networking, and data governance.
Vilfort is highlighting how organizations can use the platform to manage their generative AI tools across the hybrid cloud.
The platform will also enable customers to see the real time resource usage of each element of their AI deployment.
That's it from Vilfort, and Russo is back to share some updates on what HPE has been doing on their GreenLake platform.
First is the announcement of the general availability of the HPE Insight Centre, integrated into OpsRamp, which will provide carbon insight capabilities for businesses working with generative AI.
Here are some stats around AI and sustainability, which the HPE Insight Center will help businesses optimize the least carbon intensive workloads.
To talk more about decarbonisation is Sune Tornbo Baastrup, senior vice president and CIO at Danish engineering company Danfoss.
Baastrup is talking about how Danfoss is using genAI in a number of ways to decarbonise its heavy machinery, as well as its plans to extend their GreenLake usage into the AI space using the GreenLake for LLMs.
Baastrup has made is exit, and now Russo is announcing the GreenLake Hybrid Operations Software Suite, combining Ezmeral Unified Analytics, Data Fabrics, GreenLake OpsRamp, the HPE Sustainability Center, and HPE Backup. & Disaster Recovery.
Russo is also announcing the the extension of private cloud solutions for AI, which will be delivered as-a-service.
Russo is now joined on stage by Alberto Valero, cloud business accelerator for Europe and LATAM at NTT Data to talk about the biggest the challenges for CISOs in the era of widespread AI deployments.
Valero's advice to CISOs on genAI is in IT operations you cannot take shortcuts, and everyone needs to take control of their operational data and manage this data in their data lake, and then start applying transformation functions which can be scaled subsequently.
That's it from Valero and it also looks like that's going to be it for the keynote too as Russo takes center stage with a big 'Hybrid Cloud for AI' backdrop and is wishing everyone a wonderful rest of their conference, and thanking them for their attendance.
