The integrated F5/Intel offering, which is available, will be particularly beneficial for edge applications, such as video analytics and IoT, where low latency and high performance are crucial, wrote Kunal Anand, chief technology officer with F5, in a blog about the technology.

“F5 NGINX Plus works as a reverse proxy, offering traffic management and protection for AI model servers,” Anand wrote. “With high-availability configurations and active health checks, NGINX Plus can ensure requests from apps, workflows, or users reach an operational OpenVINO model server.”

It also enables the use of HTTPS and mTLS certificates to encrypt communications between the user application and model server without slowing performance, Anand added.

With OpenVINO, developers first convert and can further optimize and compress models for faster responses, according to Anand. “… the AI model is ready to be deployed by embedding the OpenVINO runtime into their application to make it AI capable. Developers can deploy their AI-infused application via a lightweight container in a data center, in the cloud, or at the edge on a variety of hardware architectures,” he wrote.

Integrating an Intel IPU with NGINX Plus creates a security air gap between NGINX Plus and the OpenVINO servers, according to Intel. This extra layer of security protects against potential shared vulnerabilities to help safeguard sensitive data in the AI model, the vendors stated.

Intel IPUs are compatible with the Dell PowerEdge R760 Server with Intel Xeon processors. Using an Intel IPU with a Dell PowerEdge R760 rack server can increase performance for both OpenVINO model servers and F5 NGINX Plus, according to Anand .