Broadcom and MetalSoft are forming a partnership aimed at getting the private cloud even closer to the public cloud by eliminating many of the hurdles associated with physical hardware: reducing the skills requirements, operating cost, incident response times, enabling vendor diversification and one-click deployment of the VCF AI Factory.
This partnership is aimed at those enterprises that are looking to run their own, sovereign infrastructure: healthcare, financials, defense and government. For them, while VCF has enabled cloud-like consumption, the underlying infrastructure has remained difficult to manage, requiring skills, time and effort.
Overwhelming demand for private AI solutions, whether on-prem, in colocation facilities or at the edge, is putting even more pressure on operations teams.
The combination of the proven VCF technology and MetalSoft, in a single, well tested, well supported package, will solve many of those issues:
- Improve operational efficiency
- Reduce patching windows
- Improve stability
- Reduce time to market
Solving the hardware crunch issue
As memory prices push upward with no end in sight, hardware prices are following. “Memflation” seems to be here to stay (source: Gartner). An important benefit of this joint solution is that it enables clients to diversify their hardware beyond the main vendors.
However, managing multi-vendor environments is very difficult as each hardware vendor has its own tooling and its own firmware upgrade process.
Multi-vendor engineered system
Customers have always appreciated the simplicity and reliability of engineered systems such as Dell VxRail. This partnership enables similar simplicity and reliability while enabling multiple vendors at the same time and opening the door for new specialized vendors.
This is a new generation engineered system, one that allows far more flexibility in consumption and deployment models, supporting multi-site “AI at the edge” deployments, and specialized AI-specific storage.
Reducing the gap with the Cloud
Running your own infrastructure is typically 40% to 50% less expensive than the public cloud. This new solution has the potential to improve on this cost difference while also eliminating much of the skill and complexity involved.
For Private AI infrastructure, this is even more important as the complexity of those stacks is higher and managing them requires specialized skills. The MetalSoft+VCF solution is especially focused on this use case, aiming to enable a similar consumption experience to public cloud AI services while also keeping the management overhead to a minimum.
Improving security response times
With the advent of AI-enabled attacks, manually managing the physical infrastructure introduces security risks and it widens the window of time during which a vulnerability can be exploited.
MetalSoft delivers overall faster reaction times to security incidents and enables shorter upgrade windows via replace-rather-than-upgrade and immutable OSs.
Modernizing operations with AI
MetalSoft also enables the use of AI for root cause analysis and remediation. In the case of an incident, MetalSoft's AI can automatically investigate the actual cause of the health issue, by running pings and traceroutes, pulling logs from devices and potentially from VCF clusters, correlating with deployment operations like an engineer would rather than just looking at logs or metrics. This active troubleshooting capability paves the way towards a more autonomous, self-managed and self-repairing infrastructure.
Final words
These topics are also explored at length in this Broadcom blog post.
I believe this partnership has the potential to shape the industry. To change the equation of the Cloud vs on-prem, not just in the AI space but in normal, general-purpose infrastructure as well. Stay tuned.
Alex Bordei,
CPO MetalSoft