Bringing it All Together with HPE AI Data Center Solutions

An AI factory is more than a collection of GPUs: it’s a scalable, multi-tenant system that integrates infrastructure, operating environments, control-plane services, AI workloads, security, lifecycle management, and observability. This session brings the full HPE AI data center architecture together, illustrating how HPE is the only company that offers integrated compute, storage, and networking and validated, full-stack AI data center solutions. At Networking Field Day 41, Praphul Menon, director of solutions product management for HPE’s AI factory and AI data center solutions, presented the architecture, and Praful Lalchandani closed the session.

Menon said customer conversations over the past two years have made multi-tenancy the defining requirement, with security and performance isolation close behind, because clusters now serve multiple workloads and users dynamically. HPE’s solution has four layers. Infrastructure and an operating layer of bare metal, hypervisors, or Kubernetes form the base. A control plane on top provides management, services, and orchestration, and the top layer runs AI workloads ranging from NVIDIA NIM and Hugging Face models to in-house and Slurm-based code. Security, lifecycle operations, and observability span all four layers. On the networking side, QFX switches and MX and PTX routers provide the fabric, Data Center Director orchestrates networks, and SRX firewalls can isolate tenants from one another. Engagements start with templates that turn GPU counts and rack density into a full bill of materials and topology, down to transceivers and cables. In a demo, Menon created a tenant. Ansible AWX ran playbooks that pulled network segments from NetBox, used Data Center Director APIs to build access and storage networks and routing zones, and assigned them to the tenant’s server.

Under delegate questioning, Menon explained that full tenant creation also provisions operating systems through tools such as Base Command Manager or HPCM and creates isolated storage on Weka or VAST backends. Morpheus provides the tenant administrator’s experience, while operators keep access to the individual element managers. Because the playbooks are atomic, customers can add steps such as approvals or swap NetBox for ServiceNow or their own IPAM system, and the whole stack is sold as one solution. Lalchandani closed by positioning HPE Networking as a best-of-breed pure-play vendor that can now also bring HPE compute, storage, optics, rack integration, and delivery services. He cited Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a turnkey deployment that included turn-up and benchmarking. The result, he argued, is faster GPU productivity, lower integration risk, and a single point of accountability when problems arise.