The Strategic Challenge: From AI Complexity to Cloud Simplicity, On-Premises

Enterprises today face significant hurdles when deploying AI on-premises. The journey is often fraught with lengthy deployment cycles that can span months, the immense complexity of integrating diverse hardware and software components, and the constant demand for specialized skills to manage and maintain containerized environments.

Ensuring the performance, scalability, and cost-control for powerful platforms like IBM watsonx can create a major resource drain on IT departments. Organizations need a way to harness the full power of enterprise-grade AI without the associated risks and operational overhead, allowing them to focus on innovation and business value, not infrastructure management.

The Solution: The Li9 & IBM Fusion HCI Data Lakehouse Pilot

The Li9 On-Premises AI Pilot, powered by IBM Fusion HCI, is a purpose-built, pre-integrated system that delivers a self-service cloud experience directly in your data center. This turnkey service is the definitive on-ramp for deploying the full IBM watsonx AI and Data platform with unparalleled simplicity and speed.

Our expert-led engagement provides a complete solution that combines high-performance compute, storage, networking, and GPUs with a pre-deployed Red Hat OpenShift environment. By eliminating integration risks and automating complex setup processes, we provide an optimized platform that allows you to accelerate your AI strategy and focus on driving business innovation from day one.

Deliverables

Upon completion of the On-Premises AI with watsonx Pilot, you will receive:

• A Fully Deployed IBM Fusion HCI Appliance: A production-ready, enterprise-grade private cloud platform, professionally installed and configured with the complete hardware and software stack.
• A Flexible, Operational watsonx Environment: A validated and healthy installation of the IBM watsonx platform, tailored to your specific use case. This includes essential components such as watsonx.data for your data lakehouse solution, running on the integrated Red Hat OpenShift cluster, with options to include watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance based on your requirements.
• A Configured AI Data Lakehouse: A baseline data lakehouse architecture built on IBM Storage Ceph, ready for your data ingestion and analytics workloads. This specifically leverages watsonx.data for its core functionality.
• Comprehensive Documentation: Detailed architectural diagrams, configuration guides, and operational runbooks for your new environment.
• Empowered Staff: Your team will receive hands-on knowledge transfer sessions, ensuring they are prepared to manage, use, and innovate on the new AI platform.

How It Works: An Integrated, High-Performance Stack

Our solution is built on a validated, multi-layer architecture where each component is engineered to deliver a seamless, high-performance platform for your on-premises AI workloads.

• IBM watsonx Platform & Cloud Pak for Data: This serves as your flexible engine for enterprise AI and data. The stack is deployed based on your specific needs, with watsonx.data being a core component for the data lakehouse, and additional modules like watsonx.ai for building, training, and deploying models, and watsonx.governance for ensuring trust and transparency, available for activation as required by your use case.
• Red Hat OpenShift: The enterprise-grade Kubernetes layer provides robust, scalable, and secure container orchestration. It creates a consistent cloud-native environment that simplifies the deployment and management of the entire watsonx software stack.
• IBM Fusion HCI + Ceph Storage: This is the hyperconverged foundation that makes it all possible. The pre-engineered appliance integrates all necessary compute, GPU, storage, and networking, eliminating guesswork and configuration complexity. It is built on IBM Storage Ceph, providing a high-performance, cost-effective object storage layer that can scale as your data lakehouse grows.
• Optional AFM Data Accelerator Nodes: For data lakes residing external to Fusion HCI (e.g., in remote S3 or Azure Blob buckets), optional AFM (Active File Management) data accelerator nodes can be added. These nodes intelligently and transparently cache remote data in Fusion HCI local storage, significantly improving query performance for external data sources. Configurable policies allow for pre-fetching data or fetching on demand, and for purging stale data, ensuring optimal data currency and access speed.

The Business Value Proposition: Unlock Key Advantages for Your AI Journey

This pilot is designed to deliver tangible business value across several key areas.

• Speed: From Months to Days Drastically reduce watsonx deployment times with a pre-integrated, automated system. Our expert-led service allows you to go from zero to a production-grade AI environment in a fraction of the time, enabling rapid prototyping and faster time-to-value for your AI projects. The platform’s automated Day-2 operations—including updates and lifecycle management—further reduce the ongoing management burden on your IT team.
• Performance: A 90x Leap in Query Acceleration IBM Fusion HCI is purpose-built to be the most performant way to run watsonx workloads. The IBM CIO office achieved a dramatic query acceleration of up to 90x after implementing Fusion HCI with optimized data formats. This extreme performance is critical for training complex models, running intensive data preparation jobs, and delivering real-time insights, especially when leveraging AFM nodes for external data.
• Cost-Efficiency: Superior Economics for On-Premises AI By consolidating hardware, reducing deployment times, and simplifying management, this solution offers a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to building a traditional, component-based AI platform. Its optimized resource utilization and automated operations allow you to do more with less, while the intelligent caching of AFM nodes further reduces egress costs and improves efficiency for hybrid data scenarios.
• Scalability: A Future-Proof Platform The architecture is designed for growth. Seamlessly scale up or scale out as your needs evolve. Add powerful GPU servers for demanding inferencing and model-tuning workloads, or independently expand CPU and storage capacity as your on-premises data lakehouse grows, all without disruption. The addition of AFM nodes provides flexible scaling for accessing vast external data lakes without requiring full data migration.
• Control: Enterprise-Grade Security and Governance Keep your sensitive data and AI models securely within your own data center. The platform provides the robust security and governance capabilities of IBM and Red Hat, giving you full control over your AI lifecycle while meeting stringent compliance and data sovereignty requirements.

Powering Your Key AI Initiatives

IBM Fusion HCI provides a versatile and powerful platform for a wide array of AI initiatives, allowing you to:

• Develop Generative AI & Advanced ML: Develop, fine-tune, and deploy foundation models using techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and prompt tuning with powerful, integrated GPU support. AFM nodes enhance RAG by intelligently caching relevant external data, improving query speed and relevance.
• Build an AI Data Lakehouse: Establish a high-performance, on-premises data lakehouse with watsonx.data and the massively scalable IBM Storage Ceph foundation. For hybrid data lake scenarios, AFM nodes provide seamless and accelerated access to data stored in remote S3 or Azure Blob buckets.
• Modernize Your Data Warehouse: Augment or replace legacy Hadoop and data warehouses, using the power of Spark to optimize ETL processes, reduce TCO, and accelerate analytics. AFM nodes can further accelerate these processes by bringing frequently accessed remote data closer to the compute, reducing latency for complex queries.