In his opening keynote at last week’s Red Hat Summit, Red Hat President and CEO Matt Hicks said, “The pressure for new initiatives, internal friction, and legacy constraints all happening at the same time…that combination is the villain in the room.”
Nearly every business leader agrees that success with AI is critical to business survival. According to Omdia research, 84% of organizations agree that AI is important to their organization’s future strategy.
However, AI is not easy. This isn’t just another workload you can deploy in a corner. It requires a significant investment in budget and people, which is even more difficult to achieve if your organization is already mired in legacy infrastructure and technical debt.
Moreover, success with AI requires more than just the right infrastructure, data, and tools. This requires top-down support from executives with a fundamental understanding of how AI transforms the most critical processes of the business.
Hicks went on to address these business leaders and executives:[AI agents] We perform pressure tests on all processes. We then pressure test your ability to understand technology, truly understand processes, and break down complex tasks to delegate to agents and humans. ”
Combined, these two quotes exemplify Red Hat’s vision for AI success. AI is essential but complex, requiring not only large budgets but also significant focus from IT managers, leaders, and CEOs. And to best prepare for the future of business defined by AI, IT leaders must modernize their existing legacy environments as much as possible.
They need to focus on consolidating into a single platform that can support legacy (think VMs in this case) as well as more modern container-based and AI-enabled applications and agents. The idea is to simplify through integration so that managers, developers, leaders, and executives can focus most of their attention on solving AI challenges.
Tactical IT takeaways from Red Hat Summit
It’s important for IT executives to understand that long-term AI is not a side project or silo. AI will become a fundamental aspect of multiple, if not all, areas of business. With this in mind, IT organizations should strive to modernize their legacy VM environments and establish a platform that supports mixed clusters of VM and container-based workloads, while also supporting AI applications and agents and providing a pathway for introducing AI-enabled tools into IT operations.
They should also focus on increasing automation with AI-enabled tools to further relieve IT personnel from both traditional and modern operations.
Modernize and unify your application environment for AI
To realize this vision of modernization and integration, Red Hat OpenShift is designed to help enterprises modernize their environments to prepare for AI. Second, Red Hat AI offers a portfolio of tools to help you build, train, and deploy AI models and agents on OpenShift infrastructure.
However, the challenge for many organizations is the sudden change in experience and complexity that occurs when moving from a VM-only environment to one that uses containers. To help with the first part, Red Hat introduced the OpenShift Virtualization Engine last year, offering a VM-only, upgradable OpenShift flavor designed to ease deployment and provide a VM-only hypervisor alternative for organizations looking to make a short-term migration.
The desire to optimize operations by co-managing VMs and containers on the same platform is increasingly being embraced by enterprises, due in part to rising hypervisor licensing costs. According to our research, 39% of organizations that experienced price increases for their existing hypervisor environments identified plans to accelerate their application modernization efforts to move more applications from virtual machines to containers. An additional 39% said they plan to migrate to a new platform that can support both VMs and containers.
Red Hat is not alone in innovating to provide a consistent platform across VMs, containers, and AI. For example, VMware recently scaled up VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1. Nutanix recently announced bare metal support for containers with Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Metal. And a few weeks ago, Verge.IO announced support for Kubernetes.
Due to the overall complexity of container environments, enterprises often deploy container platforms such as Kubernetes or OpenShift inside VMs. However, in the long term, combined VM, container, and AI environments may require support for bare metal containers to achieve optimal efficiency in terms of both cost and performance.
While Red Hat and others continue to innovate to simplify bare metal container environments, there is still work to be done. And until this area of complexity is more fully addressed, consolidation onto a single platform may still offer functionality benefits. However, realizing the benefits of simplification and administrative time savings can be difficult.
Adopt AI-enabled automation and operational tools
Integrating AI into IT operations, IT service management, observability, and automation platforms is already delivering significant benefits. According to an Omdia study, 39% of IT managers said at least 50% of their tasks are partially handled by an AI model or co-pilot.
At Red Hat Summit, we saw a demonstration of the Ansible Automation Platform, which features several enhancements, including the following updates:
- Integrating context-aware AI.
- An intelligent assistant that can use data specific to your organization.
- Model Context Protocol server for connecting to other AI tools.
- Automation orchestrator. Provides a visual flowchart-like interface for building logical workflows using organization-specific data.
Additionally, to simplify interoperability with other platforms, Red Hat provides integration guidance with partners such as IBM Instana, ServiceNow, and Splunk.
By using AI in conjunction with existing automation playbooks, the idea is to use AI technology for introspection to understand the environment, identify potential problems, use trusted playbooks to perform operations, and reduce the risk of illusions impacting the implementation of changes and updates.
The era of enterprise AI is here, and the use of AI-enabled applications and agents is expected to expand rapidly. Waiting for AI to become easier is not an option given that the pace within your company and your competitors can move very quickly. Due to the complexity of AI, businesses must ensure that they allocate sufficient budget and human resources to succeed. This requires optimizing legacy environments through modernization and consolidation, and increasing the use of internal IT-related AI and automation, freeing up resources elsewhere.
Scott Sinclair is a practice director at Omdia, covering the storage industry.
Omdia is a division of Informa TechTarget. The company’s analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
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