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In this video interview, Steve McDowell, principal analyst at NAND Research explains the challenges of onboarding artificial intelligence capabilities that require robust IT operations.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

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Transcript:

Ken Kaplan: Any other trends that you see as we’re going forward that are going to be momentous, especially the, especially during the economy that we have?

Steve McDowell: The biggest, the thing I’m asking most about right now is the impact of AI on IT operations. And it ranges from, you know, how many GPUs can I put in a rack and how do I heat and cool those? How do I power those? Because GPUs are very power hungry and heat-generating more so than CPUs by far. But on the other end, it’s how do I use AI and specifically generative AI to, you know, is it a threat or is it a tool that helps me do my job better? And you know, like any tool it comes down to how you use it. but you know, again, we’re still very early stages of how we’re going to use this in IT operations. But we’re using it for cybersecurity, look for anomaly patterns you know, pattern detection to tell me when there might be trouble. we’re using it for compliance to read, you know, specifications across a number of industries and, and consolidate that into, you know, a set of actions that I need to take. you know, we’re using it to write code, you know, simple pieces of code. Generative AI’s pretty good at writing it if you ask it correctly, right? And that’s kind of the double-edged sword, is asking it correctly and, and ensuring that it’s trained on, on the right knowledge to really be a benefit.

Ken Kaplan: There’s a lot of hype around AI and ChatGPT.

Steve McDowell: There’s a lot of hype around AI, and that impacts it in a couple of ways. One is I need to figure out how to build the infrastructure to support that, because traditional compute does not account for it. So we’re seeing hundreds of experiments, thousands of experiments across organizations, and it has to step up and support those often in short order. so it’s a challenge operationally. The bigger question and where I think a lot of the hype lives is what’s really the power of AI to help me do my job better. You know, generative AI and chat GPT and things like that have a lot of promise, you know, as they exist today. I think they’re interesting tools, but I don’t think anybody’s solving real production problems in it, with those tools, right? What chat G P T does very well is, you know, you train it on a set of patterns, whether that’s code or language or whatever and then it processes those in a way that it can, it can talk back to you, right? Essentially. So I can say, you know, train it on Python code and say, gimme an algorithm that sorts the problem with as they exist today is the training field is very broad. So we don’t know the quality of the data, right? Those of us old in the industry, you know, there used to be a, a garbage in, garbage out saying, and that’s really true of generative ai. So technology has a lot of promise, and I think it’s going to end up being extremely impactful to it. I think it’s just very, very early and, and, you know, I would advise any IT practitioner to well, the IT practitioner already has his expectations set. You have to manage up the chain and set expectations that this is not going to solve all the world’s problems. I can’t go fire all my tech support guys because I have, you know, ChatGPT answering the call. It’s not that simple. So, early days, but let’s keep watching it.

In this video interview, Harmail Chatha, senior director of cloud computing operations at Nutanix talks about sustainability factors and automation capabilities of AI shaping IT strategies.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

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Transcript:

Ken Kaplan: What’s your view on AI from a data center mindset?

Harmail Chatha: So AI is going to require a lot of compute, right? It’s a heavy algorithm base, which requires a lot of GPUs, high processing computers. So that’s going to require a lot more power. It’s going to require a lot more real estate, and AI is useful in so many verticals, but ultimately it’s going to be useful in the data center as well. Through AI we’ll be able to self-heal a lot of the problems at the software tier as well. We’re planning to deploy robots in our data centers to do troubleshooting as well, and that’s going to be based on a lot of AI in itself to try to tell the robot what to do, how to fix it, and ultimately we want to be able to plug into the robot Prism Central. Anytime a system does have an issue, the robot already knows and goes and tries to address it itself. So AI, obviously, is going to be tremendous, a vertical that’s going to grow and continue to grow, and it’s going to have a huge impact on data centers and sustainability in itself.

Ken Kaplan: How does it make you feel when you see this wave of AI coming?

Harmail Chatha: So the wave of AI from an infrastructure perspective is going to be tremendous. Right now we’re at a chasm where we’re doing some AI/ML for small level data sets, but now what we’re seeing in the industry, for example, with ChatGPT, that infrastructure is heavy for them to even start the company. They have to deploy so much gear so the systems could learn what to do, how to do, they literally took the entire internet and dumped it into Chat GPT. So the entire internet is run across thousands of data centers. So much power consumption. Data centers consume about 1.5% of global power. And if ChatGPT took the internet into its set and we’re building on AI, that number’s probably going to double in the future as well.

Although health misinformation gained global attention during the pandemic, it was prevalent in society well before COVID-19. On this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast, we speak with Sara Gorman, author of Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us, about her research on why we’re subject to believing health misinformation. She shares insights about the psychology of our beliefs, health misinformation’s devastating consequences and ideas on how we can overcome it in the future.

Guest: Sara Gorman, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Critica and author of Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us

In this video interview, learn how Forestry and Land Scotland discovered Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) as their ticket to moving their IT operations to public cloud.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:

Ken Kaplan: The forest needs technology?

Nick Mahlitz: Yes. The forests do yes, to manage your forests well and good, to use technology in a challenging environment like Scotland, where it’s very remote and the weather can be quite extreme sometimes. Technology and exploring all realms of technology will only help us better manage Scotland’s forests and our land.

Nick Mahlitz: I manage a team of engineers and technicians and manage our data center where all the magic happens of technology or files or applications and data, et cetera. So we manage that on a day-to-day basis. And then I’m responsible for helping lead and establish our strategic decisions in technology and our future.

Ken Kaplan: And where might technology be used in Scotland?

Nick Mahlitz: Sure. I mean, think of managing and looking after forests where some trees have diseases. The ability to use drones to scour around a forest and use AI and pattern matching algorithms and software to then find the trees that are diseased and stop that spreading is a wonderful use of technology in the realms of a tree in the middle of nowhere in Scotland.

Ken Kaplan: How did you get to this spot in your life, working at this place? How did you get here?

Nick Mahlitz: I was born in the highlands of Scotland and lived there all my life, albeit, I spent a year in Taiwan for quite a while. But I’ve always been interested in technology and for the last 20 years managing and building data centers has been what I do and trying to do it well. And that’s what I now do for Forestry and Land as well.

Ken Kaplan: That world has changed dramatically in the past, especially in 10 years. How do you feel in your career now about that world of IT? How do you feel about it?

Nick Mahlitz: You could feel many feelings about it. It’s challenging, it’s exciting. It’s unknowns. There’s so much happening that we don’t know yet. If we think about the technology over the last 20 years and how all the power was centralized and then the power of technology spread out to the edge, then it came back again into the center, and now we’re seeing this pattern repeat with edge technology and cloud computing, et cetera. So it’s an exciting world, exciting challenge ahead of us. And with the advent of cloud computing, we’ve got some real opportunities here.

Ken Kaplan: Let’s go into the data center and talk about the big challenges that you’re overcoming.

Nick Mahlitz: Yes. So Forestry and Land Scotland are only four years old, so we’ve always been forward-thinking. We have a lot of evangelists of technology in our organization. And so whilst we have our own data center the goal is always to migrate to a full public cloud and enjoy all the benefits that brings us. So one of the projects that we’re working on now is to migrate our entire data center to the public cloud. And that’s where Nutanix are really helping us. They helped us realize with NC2, their product, that migration path can be less challenging than what many other private and public sector organizations are experiencing. To re-engineer all their workloads into cloud takes significant money takes significant resources in terms of skills, which is a big problem in the world, finding and keeping good cloud-skilled people. So yeah, NC2 gives us the ability to migrate our data center to the public cloud using tools that we’re very familiar with. Because Nutanix offers that single management plane to manage both your private and your public instances. So that’s a very exciting project for us, and particularly because we in Scotland have high aspirations for sustainability for our net zero targets for CO emission, CO2 two emissions et cetera. So NC2 really does lend its weight into that area, and that’s very important, very important for us. So an exciting time where we can migrate our data center to the cloud and free up our digital technologists and our IT skilled people to perhaps concentrate on other things like AI and automation and other new exciting technologies.

Ken Kaplan: Let’s talk about sustainability and NC2. Tell me how it’s helping you particularly achieve some goals or set some new strategies for sustainability.

Nick Mahlitz: Yes. So we’re actively looking at the metrics and analytics behind what we currently have in our private data center. And then with Nutanix’s assistance, we know what that will look like with NC2 in the cloud. And there could potentially could be up to a 40% reduction in our footprint, which is a big savings. So whilst we don’t have the analytics yet, it’s a report I’m looking to create in June this year. NC2 really does help with that. And as we try to meet Scottish government targets for sustainability and we’ll do that via our vehicle management and our buildings management. But our data center is another big area where we can reduce that by using public cloud and NC2.

Ken Kaplan: Do you, do you ever get a sense that what you’re doing can also help other government agencies?

Nick Mahlitz: Yeah, yeah, very much so. We meet frequently with other agencies and the Scottish government in cloud communities where we share what each of us are doing in that area. And there’s been so much good work done by the Scottish government and realizing all the technologies to migrate to the public cloud, but what we are doing, no one else has done. And so using NC2 to trailblaze in this and show the benefits to my peers in our government organization, I think it’s key for me if I can help reduce costs and manage those costs in a fixed way. And if I can avoid the challenges around recruitment, which is a particularly challenging thing in the UK to reduce our footprint, then I think other organizations in the government and public sector should also look to and analyze both your native cloud approach and using technology like NC2.

Ken Kaplan: I mostly want to just capture what it is that you do. It’s interesting because we don’t think about, you know, the forest and technology and that you’re actually trailblazing. You said that those great words.

Nick Mahlitz: If you think about what’s important to people nowadays, you know physical and mental health and wellbeing are very much on the forefront of the organization. You’ve got to look after your people. If you don’t invest in your people and lose them, then you know, the organization suffers. So, Forestry and Land Scotland wants to invest in their people. We want to look after the people of Scotland, too. So, you know, there are areas that we do in terms of creating visitor centers and tourist places, and those green spaces where the family can go out for a day and enjoy a wonderful day with a picnic and enjoy the beautiful scenery that Scotland has. That’s very much also in our hearts. And again, technology is playing a part in that because we can deliver services to these rural areas that are in isolation in a better way with technology, which is a fantastic thing to do, to look after your people.

Ken Kaplan: Stepping back. The land of Scotland is the treasure, it’s precious. What’s your mission with all this?

Nick Mahlitz: Yeah, our mission is to look after our land and enhance the management of the land and forest for the people of Scotland and manage it on their behalf. Really, we’re just custodians of this. And give them the beautiful scenery that Scotland has and give it to the people to enjoy. But we also have the responsibility to not only manage that but to manage that in a sustainable way. So managing our forests in the best way possible, managing our land and creating renewable energy to help that sustainability piece is very important to us. So that’s our mission, to really provide what Scotland is to its people, but also really help our government and the world for climate control because it’s one of our big, big strategies that we take.

Intel Corporation embraced Digital Twins to transform their microprocessor fabs. Now Intel engineers have packaged this technology and made it available to manufacturers around the world.

Intel Automated Factory Solutions is a suite of products that embody the experience Intel has gained implementing Digital Twins. Designed specifically for high-end technical manufacturers, these products are custom-fit to meet each customer’s unique operational challenges. Expert Intel engineers work on-site with customer stakeholders each step of the way, from initial product planning up until all systems are online, running, and producing.

As Intel’s successful adoption has proved, Digital Twin technology can deliver tremendous benefits and cost savings for manufacturers today, and tomorrow.

The Intel Information Security proof of concept demonstrated the CrowdStrike Falcon platform can quickly identify, contain, and remediate threats.

CrowdStrike and Intel co-engineered a new, advanced memory scanning capability based on Intel TDT delivering an additional layer of defense.

A recent study found that women in their 30s show higher levels of binge drinking and alcohol use disorder than women of the same age in previous years. The study also identifies delayed parenthood as a potential cause for this worrisome trend. In this episode of the Business Group on Health podcast, we speak with the Boston University professor who spearheaded this study, Dr. Rachel Sayko Adams. Listen to the episode to learn about how societal shifts, including targeted marketing and the normalization of “wine-mom culture” have driven drinking trends. Looking forward, we also discuss the emerging ‘sober curious’ movement and how employers can support employees interested in reducing or avoiding alcohol intake.

Guest: Rachel Sayko Adams, PhD, MPH, Research Associate Professor, Boston University School of Public Health.

In this video, see an early version of a modeling tool that estimates carbon emissions and power consumption of data center operations. This data can help shape strategies and inform decisions around IT sustainability.

Related: Building Scalable, Sustainable Data Centers

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:

Mat Brown: Cheers, Ken. I’m Mat Brown. I’m the technical lead for data center and Sustainability at Nutanix. We’re here today in Chicago for Nutanix dot X 2023, and I’m gonna show you a little bit about the Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator tool, which is an educational tool we’ve been developing and currently have it in early access. We’re previewing it here and it’s to help our customers better understand their environmental impact of their IT systems.

Ken Kaplan: Okay, so what do, what do we see on the screen?

Mat Brown: So on the screen, we’ve simplified down these four inputs. On the left-hand side here we have a type solution type. We have the sort of workload for that solution type in terms of the number of virtual machines. We have the p e that’s the power usage effectiveness or how efficient the data center is in terms of delivering power to workloads. And then we have the location here at the bottom, so the location of where that workload’s running. And that’s really important because of the carbon intensity related to the electricity grid that the data center would pull its power from.

Ken Kaplan: Just describe to me again, why would people want to use this or why do they need it?

Mat Brown: This is mainly an educational tool so that people can better understand the different aspects of their workload, where it is, how efficient their data center is and where it’s located and what that overall adds up to.

Ken Kaplan: Okay. Can you show me what kinds of systems you have in here, and what you can analyze? Yeah,

Mat Brown: Sure. So we’ve got a few different solutions. These are all based on Nutanix-validated designs. No, we’ve generalized and simplified things here, a great deal. But because of the way that Nutanix scales really linearly and because of the great work our teams have been doing around the validated designs, we’ve been able to base them on these core validated designs here. So we’ve got generally virtualized applications, databases using NDB (Nutanix Database Services) and end user computing, virtual desktops, and cloud native Kubernetes as well. So we’ll just pick one of these and then in those validated designs there is a config for a bm, a typical CPU and RAM. And from that, we can then decide how many we want to apply to a workload. So here I’m giving a 4,000 virtual machine workload that’s based on a certain configuration that’s documented in our validated designs. We can then have a look at the data center, p u e.