Innovation meets sustainability in the future of business

Nev­er have com­pa­nies been faced with such a rapid­ly chang­ing oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment where they must adapt at speed to sur­vive and thrive. Even before the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic upend­ed the world, dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion was trans­form­ing the busi­ness land­scape as we knew it. To suc­ceed amid the sheer pace of change, organ­i­sa­tions need to mas­ter the art of agili­ty and inno­va­tion on demand.

Both agili­ty and inno­va­tion are dri­ven by data. How­ev­er, enter­pris­es have been over­whelmed by the huge vol­umes of data they’ve gen­er­at­ed and col­lect­ed over the last decade and have strug­gled to organ­ise, analyse and cre­ate busi­ness val­ue from it. To extract insights and exe­cute dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in an increas­ing­ly dis­trib­uted busi­ness land­scape, which has only been fur­ther accel­er­at­ed by COVID-19, com­pa­nies must be able to process and analyse data where it is cre­at­ed.

To sup­port inno­va­tion on demand, lead­ing enter­pris­es are see­ing the cloud as an expe­ri­ence rather than a des­ti­na­tion. Yet while near­ly every organ­i­sa­tion has embraced the cloud in some way, most enter­prise apps and data still reside in the dat­a­cen­tre. This means infra­struc­ture must trans­form so the cloud, and intel­li­gence, can be brought near­er to where the data is gen­er­at­ed or col­lect­ed among cus­tomers, part­ners and employ­ees work­ing from dis­trib­uted loca­tions, oth­er­wise known as the “edge”.

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) is cru­cial to trans­form­ing expo­nen­tial­ly grow­ing data into insight, action and val­ue. HPE, the edge-to-cloud plat­form as-a-ser­vice com­pa­ny, pow­ers work­loads in the dat­a­cen­tre or at the edge, deliv­er­ing cloud ser­vices to the data, wher­ev­er it is, with one con­sis­tent oper­at­ing mod­el and with vis­i­bil­i­ty and gov­er­nance of all apps and data. It part­ners close­ly with NVIDIA, the glob­al leader in AI, to unlock val­ue from IT estates and help com­pa­nies achieve the promise of inno­va­tion on demand.

Sustainable synergies

Com­pa­nies are increas­ing­ly real­is­ing the sig­nif­i­cant syn­er­gies between inno­va­tion on demand and achiev­ing their busi­ness and sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals. Tru­ly sus­tain­able tech­nol­o­gy not only pow­ers core busi­ness objec­tives and deliv­ers sub­stan­tial cost-sav­ings, but also helps fuel cir­cu­lar­i­ty, reduce car­bon emis­sions and even find vital cures for dis­eases. Through such solu­tions, organ­i­sa­tions can grow their busi­ness and opti­mise their oper­a­tions, while dri­ving soci­ety towards a more sus­tain­able future.

HPE and NVIDIA part­nered to pro­vide the Nether­lands Can­cer Insti­tute (NKI) with agile tech­nol­o­gy that accel­er­ates can­cer research and treat­ments through inno­va­tion on demand. Each day, NKI’s researchers con­sume more than 100 ter­abytes of data, which was pre­vi­ous­ly analysed on local machines under their desks, a time-con­sum­ing, expen­sive task. Hav­ing upgrad­ed to a soft­ware-defined infra­struc­ture, using HPE servers and NVIDIA vir­tu­al graph­ics pro­cess­ing units (GPUs), health­care pro­fes­sion­als can spend more time with patients, while researchers use the same plat­form to run the intense work­loads they need.

Through col­lab­o­ra­tions with research cen­tres using its HPC and AI solu­tions, HPE has aid­ed com­plex COVID-19 research, which has helped accel­er­ate drug and vac­cine dis­cov­ery. In addi­tion, researchers around the world are using NVIDIA’s sci­en­tif­ic com­put­ing plat­form to fight the pan­dem­ic, from detec­tion and con­tain­ment to mit­i­ga­tion and treat­ment, mon­i­tor­ing and track­ing.

NVIDIA is also lead­ing the way in improv­ing com­put­ing ener­gy effi­cien­cy. Its GPUs are up to 42 times more effi­cient than CPU (cen­tral pro­cess­ing unit) servers for AI work­loads, and its GPU-accel­er­at­ed dat­a­cen­tres take up just 4 per cent the space of non-accel­er­at­ed dat­a­cen­tres. Mean­while, HPE recent­ly received the Gold Class dis­tinc­tion from S&P Glob­al for its sus­tain­abil­i­ty per­for­mance.

“Accel­er­at­ed com­put­ing is the most ener­gy-effi­cient approach to solv­ing large-scale AI chal­lenges and all our new dat­a­cen­tres will be ful­ly sourced from renew­able ener­gy,” says Rod Evans, NVIDIA’s Europe, Mid­dle East and Africa direc­tor of HPC and AI.

Nitu Kaushal, Gen­er­al Man­ag­er, Com­pute, Edge, Inter­net of Things & Dig­i­tal Solu­tions at HPE, adds: “We take a com­plete life-cycle approach with our part­ners, bring­ing togeth­er finan­cial, envi­ron­men­tal and tech­nol­o­gy needs to advance the way peo­ple live and work.”

Learn more about how HPE and NVIDIA are trans­form­ing busi­ness at NVIDIA GPU Tech­nol­o­gy Con­fer­ence, April 12–16, 2021 hpe.com/events/gtc

Pro­mot­ed by Hewlett Packard Enter­prise