Dell expands generative AI products and services

Dell Technologies is expanding its generative AI products and services offerings.

The vendor introduced its generative AI lineup at the end of July, but that news was centered around validating existing hardware designs for training and inferencing. Dell’s new products are models made for customization and tuning.

The name is a mouthful: Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA for Model Customization. The solutions are designed to help customers more quickly and securely extract intelligence from their data.

There may be a race to move anything and everything to the cloud, but that doesn’t include generative AI, according to Dell’s research. Among enterprises surveyed by Dell, 82% prefer an on-premises or hybrid solution to AI processing, said Carol Wilder, Dell’s vice president for cross portfolio software and solutions.

“Due to the complexity and the necessary customization that enterprises need to do with the data, they find that they need to rapidly expand beyond pre-trained models with their corporate data, creating requirements to customize large language models,” Wilder told a conference call of journalists.

More than one-third of enterprises are already considering building enterprise-specific LLMs, and their pre-trained models are not sufficient for their success, so they have to customize those models, Dell found in its research.

Dell’s solution provides best practices for customizing and fine-tuning generative AI models based on desired outcomes while keeping information secure and on-premises. This approach can give organizations multiple ways to tailor their models to accomplish specific tasks with proprietary data.

The designs run on Dell’s AI-validated hardware, including the Dell PowerEdge XE9680 and the Dell PowerEdge XE8640, both with a choice of Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software stack. It also comes with storage options such as Dell PowerScale and Dell ObjectScale, supporting multiple storage data types with the validated design.

Beyond the models, Dell has expanded its professional services to include Data Preparation Services, which are designed to clean up customer data and ensure it is in the correct format for AI projects.

Dell is also launching Implementation Services to help companies get to an operational generative AI platform for inferencing and model customization, as well as Education Services to provide workers with the necessary critical skills for generative AI.

“We’ll work with customers on realistically what is the right way, or the best way, for the customer to do data preparation services,” Wilder said.

Another newly launched offering is Dell Implementation Services, which establishes an operational generative AI platform for inferencing and model customization, designed to accelerate the time to deployment. It is paired with Dell Managed Services, Dell’s remote management offering. The service will come integrated with analytics software from Starburst.

The hardware will be available starting in late October through traditional channels and Dell’s APEX IT as-a-service offerings. Dell Implementation Services will be available next year.