Harness your AI advantage: Is private cloud the secret weapon you need?

[HPE_Experts]

Principled Technologies’ latest report details the best strategies to tackle private cloud AI by comparing deployment options and the benefits of a turnkey solution.

Forget slow and steady. AI is exploding across the board—hardware, software, and everything. For businesses wanting to tap into this power, keeping up feels like a never-ending race. And let’s not forget the biggie: keeping your data and secrets locked down tight.

More and more, the days of just tossing experimental AI into public clouds are fading. The reason? Growing anxieties about keeping corporate secrets and sensitive data under wraps. Plus, let’s not ignore the hefty price tag of running crucial, always-on AI in shared public environments. Add in compliance headaches and the potential for your company’s valuable intellectual property (IP) to end up where it shouldn’t, and you’ve got a recipe for change. That change? Private cloud infrastructure is gaining serious traction as the deployment model built for AI’s unique security and compliance needs.

What’s the best way for your organization to tackle a private cloud? Principled Technologies’ new report explores three distinct strategies along with a comparison against existing solutions, based on publicly available data from April 2025.

Figure 1. Basic components of the three approaches to deploy AI infrastructure for private cloud (courtesy: Principled Technologies)

 HPE Private Cloud AI: Integrated and ready for AI

Principled Technologies’ new report helps you navigate the AI infrastructure landscape. It compares public cloud and on-premises options before focusing on the latter. If you’re considering on-premises AI, the report contrasts the three main strategies: DIY, reference architecture with services, and turnkey.

You can’t directly compare a DIY approach because everyone’s needs are different. That’s why the report spotlights HPE Private Cloud AI as the turnkey option. This prebuilt AI platform speeds up your AI projects with flexible hardware and integrated software. While it includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise (like the reference architecture solution), HPE Private Cloud AI adds even more value with preintegrated tools such as Apache Spark, Airflow, Kubeflow, MLflow, EzPresto, Ray, Superset and pre-optimized NVIDIA Blueprints.

A key advantage highlighted by Principled Technologies is the swift installation of this solution. Automated setup and integration are completed within a single day, a significant differentiator from the other deployment methods. Further simplifying operations, HPE handles day 2 IT lifecycle management post-deployment, including ongoing maintenance and updates, effectively reducing operational overhead.

Streamlined AI development with built-in software ecosystem
HPE Private Cloud AI keeps your entire AI team in mind. IT admins get a handle on things with HPE GreenLake while the integrated HPE AI Essentials provides user-friendly interfaces tailored to what each team member needs, making AI management a breeze. The consistent design across all tools means less complexity and a smoother ride for creating and deploying AI projects.

 Figure 2. Cloud administrators can manage users, tools, data sources, and applications from a single dashboard in HPE GreenLake

The cloud administrator’s unified dashboard is their go-to for seeing and controlling the AI world. IT gets instant access to what matters: a live view of AI app and infrastructure health, pinpoint control of resources such as GPUs, easy setup for user and app permissions, and automated system updates. This streamlined approach makes daily work much easier and delivers the smarts to proactively manage the environment and keep resources humming.

 Figure 3. Persona-based portal for seamless access to AI tools and frameworks

Moving into the next level, HPE AI Essentials provides a smart, organized portal for AI administrators and developers. Think of it as a personalized toolbox, bringing together the most popular open source and commercial AI tools and frameworks your teams are familiar with.  

HPE Private Cloud AI provides a toolbox for each different role. Data engineers get out-of-the-box access to Airflow for managing data workflows, EzPresto for quick data querying, and Superset for data visualization. For data analysts, it includes Livy to simplify submitting analysis jobs, Spark history server to track analysis execution, and Spark Operator to manage Spark jobs on Kubernetes. Data scientists can leverage Kubeflow for scaling machine learning workflows and Ray for scaling both AI and Python applications.

Don’t see your go-to tool? HPE Private Cloud AI has you covered. Just use the import framework button (check out the top right of Figure 3) to bring it in. Once configured, it’s automatically protected by the platform’s built-in compliance and security.

AI developers, get ready to hit the ground running! HPE Private Cloud AI provides immediate access to the essentials: preconfigured Jupyter notebooks for coding and experimentation, Apache Airflow for building reliable data pipelines, and query editors for fast data insights. To accelerate development, pretrained models such as Llama 3 are built in, allowing you to deploy AI apps quickly using adaptable templates in your Jupyter notebooks. For ultimate flexibility, you can pull in publicly available models or your own Kubernetes-based tools and apps through the HPE AI Essentials interface—seamlessly integrating your existing K8s’ ecosystem into HPE Private Cloud AI.

Making AI accessible to everyone

 Figure 4. Three-step process and automated background processes streamline GenAI app deployment

Harnessing the magic of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) requires a variety of talents. HPE AI Essentials bridges any skill gap by providing a platform that speaks both code and no code. This empowers everyone on your team, regardless of their coding background, to create and deploy powerful GenAI solutions.

Take it a step further: train LLMs using your company’s internal knowledge base—your past experiences and specialized data in sectors like healthcare, legal, or finance—and build AI that’s not just intelligent, but business smart.

Summary
To truly harness the continuous advancements in AI, having a solid AI infrastructure deployment strategy is key. The new report from Principled Technologies offers a valuable comparison of private cloud options, and it shows that HPE Private Cloud AI offers the simplest and quickest path to value. Discover how its integrated design, rapid deployment, streamlined management, and accessible GenAI tools can revolutionize your AI initiatives. Download the report today.

Learn more at
HPE.com/Private-Cloud-AI

Meet the Author:

Joann Starke, Senior Marketing Manager, HPE Private Cloud AI
linkedin.com/in/joann-starke