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Pinnacle and NVIDIA: Pioneering AI services for a sustainable future
In a significant step towards transforming the AI landscape, Pinnacle is proud to leverage its status as the sole local distributor of AI pioneer NVIDIA’s products, which form a core component of its recently announced AI-focused offering.
The partnership is more than a business relationship; it's a strategic alliance poised to revolutionise AI adoption across industries, explains Belinda Duke, Business Development Manager for NVIDIA at Pinnacle. She notes that, as a top-performing brand, NVIDIA's market leadership, financial performance, and strategic positioning in key technology sectors make it an indispensable player in today’s technology industry.
“With careful planning and strategic implementation, AI can lead to valuable insights, improved efficiency and innovation, allowing organisations to adapt to the changing business landscape, stay competitive, and drive growth. AI will continue to gain traction as companies realise the benefits of automation, both financially and competitively.
“However, for many local businesses especially, the questions remain: where do they start on their AI journey and what do they prioritise?” she asks.
“Pinnacle understands that beginning an AI journey can be a significant endeavour for any organisation. We’re therefore pleased to announce that, alongside NVIDIA, and with the added integration of brands like Supermicro within the Pinnacle stack, we are now able to offer exemplary turnkey AI solutions to companies within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, helping them to find their feet within the AI arena.”
Accelerating AI implementations
Organisations have multiple pathways to explore:
1. Using open-source software, which carries with it the risks of lengthy deployment times, complexity, lack of support, and non-optimised stacks.
2. Making use of NVIDIA's end-to-end Accelerated Computing stack, with certified hardware, certified software (AI workflows and pre-trained models), and 24x7 support and expertise.
3. Leveraging NVIDIA developer partners who have developed point solutions for AI outcomes, offering the quickest route to market with minimal customisation.
NVIDIA's partnerships with top-tier OEMs, like Supermicro, ensures that certified infrastructure solutions meet the demands of scalable AI projects. In addition to hardware, NVIDIA's software ecosystem and expertise empower companies to deploy AI projects swiftly while maximising its potential.
“AI is not just about the computing platform; it’s about developing outcomes that benefit the business. NVIDIA provides the hardware, software and expertise to guide and assist customers in developing their AI journeys swiftly and effectively, giving them a competitive edge. In fact, the NVIDIA ecosystem is supported by over 4 million developers, all contributing to AI advancements,” explains Duke.
Building a greener future: NVIDIA’s commitment to sustainability NVIDIA recently partnered with Teraco in South Africa as a DGX-Ready data centre facility and colocation provider to meet the demands of AI-powered applications, machine learning (ML), and virtual and augmented reality.
“Given the rise of AI, enterprises need to weigh several factors before selecting a data centre partner to execute and manage future-ready AI deployments. Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important consideration in the fields of AI and ICT in general. Overall, the trend towards sustainability reflects a growing recognition of the need to balance technological innovation with environmental and social responsibility,” she continues.
“Enterprise leaders aiming to reduce their
environmental impact should consider their data centre partner’s commitment to sustainability, as the right collaborator will have the components in place to meet the energy demands for AI computing, while also increasing power density and monitoring the centre’s carbon footprint.
“These efforts should encompass elevating energy efficiency, reducing waste, decreasing water usage, aligning with sustainable building standards, accessing renewable and clean energy, and delivering asset value or lowering operating costs for their customers, and this very topic was very much emphasised at a recent joint Teraco/NVIDIA event.”
"NVIDIA is also constantly innovating and evolving products to meet ever-increasing demands from customers," adds Duke. "Scaling down energy consumption is a priority to the organisation. As an essential element in addressing the growing adoption of AI in a sustainable manner, its GPUs deliver higher performance per watt, allowing data centre operators to pack more compute within the same power budget.
“Reducing the consumption of raw materials is another important consideration, with the physical resources required to build computing hardware having a significant impact on the environment. Data centres with NVIDIA GPUs require a fraction of the rack space and energy cost. Additionally, digital twins allow us to simulate before we build, leading to saved resources from physical prototypes or experiments.”
Start your AI journey with NVIDIA’s future-ready AI solutions
In partnership with NVIDIA, Pinnacle is dedicated to guiding organisations through their AI journeys with robust, sustainable solutions. “By maximising NVIDIA's cuttingedge technology and Pinnacle's strategic expertise, businesses can unlock the full potential of AI, driving innovation and efficiency while maintaining a commitment to sustainability,” Duke concludes. n
For more information on the NVIDIA solutions available locally through Pinnacle, please contact Belinda Duke at belindad@pinnacle.co.za or +27 (0) 11 265-3000. Alternatively, please visit https://www.pinnacle.co.za/nvidia-networking
Harnessing AI potential: Pinnacle brings Supermicro's advanced solutions to local markets
Fortune Magazine recently heralded Supermicro as ‘riding the AI wave’, a testament to the company's strategic foresight and dedication to AI innovation. Its secret? A customer-centric approach that has allowed the organisation to deliver fast, efficient and reliable performance, ensuring that it remains a dominant force in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
“At Pinnacle, we recognise and celebrate Supermicro’s accomplishments, attributing this success to an early and significant investment in research and development, coupled with a close collaboration with customers and partners to create integrated hardware and software solutions,” explains Pinnacle Business Development Manager, Christoper Coetzee
A partnership poised to transform the local AI market
Incorporating Supermicro’s state-of-the-art solutions into Pinnacle’s AI offerings is a game-changer for the South African market, Coetzee adds.
“By working together, Pinnacle and Supermicro can offer customers a complete and reliable solution that's backed by local support and expertise.
Cutting-edge AI solutions
Through Pinnacle, the latest and most
advanced AI solutions from Supermicro are now available to the local market. Key offerings include:
• Powerful SuperCluster solutions: Scalable, ready-to-deploy generative AI clusters designed for complex AI workloads, the Supermicro SuperCluster solutions provide foundational building blocks for the present and future of large language model (LLM) infrastructure.
• NVIDIA HGX H100/H200 8-GPU systems: With unprecedented performance, scalability and reliability, Supermicro’s rack scale AI solutions accelerate the performance of computationally intensive generative AI, LLM training, and high performance computing (HPC) applications, while meeting the evolving demands of growing model sizes.
• NVIDIA MGX systems: Optimised for cloud-scale inference, this modular architecture is designed to standardise AI infrastructure and accelerated computing, enabling efficient AI deployment.
• Liquid cooling technology: Supermicro’s liquid cooling solution is able to reduce OpEx (operating expenses) by up to 40 percent, keeping systems running smoothly
and efficiently while reducing energy consumption, which is crucial for maintaining performance and sustainability.
The inclusion of NVIDIA-certified systems, integrated with NVIDIA Amperefamily GPUs, will further accelerate AI workflows and inferencing.
AI for all industries
Pinnacle’s AI strategy, supported by Supermicro’s cutting-edge solutions, will target data-intensive industries poised to benefit significantly from AI's transformative capabilities. This includes sectors such as healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing, security, agriculture transportation, telecommunications government; and education.
“These are all areas that can use AI to work smarter, make better decisions, and innovate,” Coetzee adds. “And by leveraging Supermicro’s world-class solutions, Pinnacle is ideally positioned to empower local enterprises to achieve their strategic goals, helping to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and drive improvements and efficiencies.
“Our partnership with Supermicro signifies a bold step towards a future in which AI is an integral part of the business landscape in South Africa and beyond.” n
For more information on the Supermicro solutions available locally through Pinnacle, please contact Christopher Coetzee at supermicro@pinnacle.co.za, or +27 (0) 11 265-3000. Alternatively, please visit https://www.pinnacle.co.za/brands-managers-page/supermicro
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Leveraging AI with Nutanix
A recent report from Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, entitled the ‘Nutanix State of Enterprise AI Report’, highlights a crucial global trend: that the adoption of enterprise AI applications and workloads will spark a new wave of IT infrastructure modernisation initiatives focused on data mobility, security and protection.
And this trend, says Gerhard Breytenbach, Head of Pre-Sales & Architecting at Pinnacle, is where Nutanix's offerings shine. "Using the public cloud for training large language models (LLMs) with publicly available data is logical. However, when proprietary data and intellectual property are involved, bringing AI models and training onpremises becomes essential to maintain data sovereignty and also curb costs."
As a vendor with technologies that underpin the recent launch of Pinnacle’s AI-focused services division, Nutanix stands out by providing a consistent cloud operating model across all clouds, whether private, public or hybrid environments. This makes it an ideal solution stack for running AI workloads, clarifies Breytenbach.
“Once AI testing and development are completed in the public cloud, businesses can seamlessly transition their AI models and training on-premises without refactoring, running alongside existing nonAI workloads.”
Security and data protection at the core "Nutanix’s report noted that data security, data quality, scalability and speed of development were respondents’ top considerations related to running AI workloads. Additionally, over 90 percent said that security and reliability are important considerations in their AI
strategy. Nutanix’s security measures are embedded from day one," he continues.
The Nutanix Security Development Lifecycle (SecDL) ensures that security is integrated into every development step. This approach means that Nutanix platforms are secure out of the box, avoiding the need for end-users to undertake additional hardening processes.
Nutanix’s Distributed Storage System further protects against data loss, and its native software-based encryption provides in-transit and at-rest data protection, ensuring that proprietary data remains secure.
Pinnacle and Nutanix: a strategic partnership
Nutanix is a cornerstone brand for Pinnacle, enabling the delivery of enterprise-grade cloud solutions to local organisations of all sizes through valued partners, Breytenbach notes.
"AI can be both costly and complex, but Nutanix’s focus on return on investment (ROI) and simplicity mirrors Pinnacle’s own mission to make advanced technologies accessible to organisations within the Southern African Development Community (SADC)."
Nutanix continues to innovate with solutions that are easy to deploy and operate. Through robust validation processes, the company simplifies the design and deployment of AI solutions, ensuring a streamlined customer experience. Nutanix Validated Designs (NVDs) offer bundled solutions that accelerate and simplify AI deployment, providing comprehensive hardware, software and service components to streamline the process.
Nutanix’s recent collaborations with
NVIDIA and Dell further enhance Pinnacle’s AI offerings. “As a hardware-agnostic software vendor, Nutanix enables Pinnacle to supply its full-stack AI platform across a variety of hardware choices, including Nutanix’s Supermicro-based NX range and Dell’s XC range.
“The Nutanix approach really simplifies AI adoption, maintains control, and optimises costs for enterprises,” says Breytenbach. n
For organisations looking to implement GPT capabilities while maintaining control over their data and applications, Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box, a turnkey AI solution, is among the standout products available through Pinnacle. This solution includes:
● Nutanix Cloud Platform infrastructure on GPU-enabled server nodes;
● Nutanix Unified Storage for running and fine-tuning GPT models;
● Open-source software for AI workload deployment, including PyTorch and Kubeflow;
● Support for LLMs such as Llama2, Falcon, MPT, and Hugging Face;
● Unified user interface for model management and API endpoints;
● Support for Nvidia AI Enterprise software; and
● Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs for enhanced performance.
Image Reference: https://www.nutanix. com/solutions/ai
For more information on the Nutanix solutions available locally through Pinnacle, please contact Gerhard Breytenbach at gerhardb@pinnacle.co.za or +27 (0) 11 265-3000. Alternatively, please visit https://www.pinnacle.co.za/nutanix
Spotlight on Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box
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Pinnacle and Dell team up to bridge the AI readiness gap locally
Generative AI (GenAI) has been called the ‘accelerator of the decade’, representing a significant and immediate opportunity for organisations to unlock insight from data, elevate productivity and transform customer experience. A subset of artificial intelligence (AI), GenAI can leverage large data sets to create high-quality content in many forms, including text, images, video and software code.
However, capitalising on the extraordinary potential of GenAI is easier said than done. It brings with it immense complexity as well as questions around which model to choose, how to produce business outcomes quickly, and how to manage risks such as data protection, security and cost control, among others.
To better understand what’s limiting or stopping organisations from embracing these innovations, Dell Technologies recently surveyed 500 IT leaders from several countries to generate important insights around readiness and potential.
According to the GenAI Pulse Survey, 76 percent of information technology decisionmakers think that the impact of GenAI on their organisation will be significant, if not transformative. Top areas of influence listed included productivity gains, streamlining of processes and cost savings. In fact, 49 percent of respondents believe that they will see meaningful results from their AI investments in between six months to a year.
But despite these very positive results, over a third of leaders surveyed revealed
hesitance in implementing AI, listing concerns around data security, complexity of implementation and the effects on existing teams.
“GenAI shows exciting potential for innovation, but it also opens up difficulties in terms of implementation and risk,” explains Wilfred Mokhaloane, Pre-Sales Engineer at Pinnacle, a local Dell partner “Challenges are mounting around how to prioritise use cases, determine technical feasibility and maximise business value.
“There are numerous use cases aligned to GenAI, and it’s critical for businesses to identify and prioritise those that are best aligned to specific business needs. Could it be customer operations, content creation, software development or sales and marketing?,” he asks.
Helping local businesses to take the first step in their GenAI journeys
“With the recent launch of our AI-focused services division, Pinnacle is working very closely with Dell to help our local channel and end user clients determine where to start in their AI journeys, gauge their readiness in leveraging GenAI across business and IT dimensions, and how to gain the very real value promised.”
As part of its collaboration with Dell, Pinnacle is offering an intensive half-day workshop to its South African Development Community (SADC) channel partners and their customers.
“The Dell Accelerator Workshop for GenAI provides an excellent starting point
to determining how a business will achieve maximised benefits from GenAI. It draws on Dell’s extensive experience working with thousands of other organisations, focusing on the activities required to achieve a company’s desired end state and next steps to further advance its business and IT strategies.”
The Accelerator Workshop helps companies to identify their current state, single out challenges within the environment, define goals and objectives, establish a vision for an ideal future state, develop an executive roadmap, and outline expected results and benefits.
Dell Technologies Services provides a full portfolio of options across the GenAI lifecycle to further help businesses accelerate time to value of high performance GenAI architecture, and enable the creation of GenAI solutions aligned to specific business needs and use cases.
“Dell Technologies has the world’s broadest GenAI solutions portfolio – from desktop to data centre to cloud – and the company recently announced its expansion of the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA to include new server, edge, workstation, solutions and services advancements that speed AI adoption and innovation.
“Dell’s end-to-end capabilities are a core differentiator, and one that Pinnacle believes will help support local organisations to leverage AI in order to move boldly into this next technological revolution,” Mokhaloane concludes. n
For more information on the Dell solutions available locally through Pinnacle, please contact Wilfred Mokhaloane at wilfredm@pinnacle.co.za or +27 (0) 11 265-3000. Alternatively, please visit https://www.pinnacle.co.za/brands-managers-page/dell-enterprise