‘We’re trying to make this as available as possible, but we think this is going to have a significant appeal for Dell partners,’ Equinix’s Lisa Miller, tells CRN.

Equinix is making it easy to stand up rack-scale AI deployments, as well as providing the advanced storage, and networking required of the most demanding data tasks in the enterprise with its new partnership with Dell Technologies.

The partnership features Dell’s AI Factory with Nvidia, which includes the hardware as well as the consultation and data preparation needed to move an AI concept through to execution, all within Equinix data centers.

“If you think about AI, we want to demystify that. It really is just another workload. Now it’s a high-performance compute workload, but it is still another workload,” Lisa Miller, senior vice president of platform alliances at Equinix, told CRN.

Miller said while all enterprises are investing in AI technology, the difficulties in setting up the most modern AI infrastructures and feeding it data that is ready to be trained is where they stumble. She said AI deployments require deep technical knowledge, substantial computational resources, and robust IT infrastructure.

“It is not super easy,” she told CRN. “We’re seeing enterprises increasingly turning to the partner ecosystem to navigate the intricacies of the AI landscape and to really bridge that skills gap.”

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Chad Dunn, Dell Technologies vice president of product management for artificial intelligence and data management, said this partnership provides prescriptive and proven infrastructure to run AI workloads up through the software stack, all housed inside an Equinix facility that is built to keep the devices and data running at peak performance.

“So this is inclusive of the Dell servers, Nvidia software stack, the Nvidia accelerators, Dell storage, Nvidia networking, all predefined,” he told CRN. “So we know the performance characteristics of it. We know how the different workloads are going to perform. And for IT organizations, they’ve got that consistent layer of IT infrastructure to support whatever the AI workload.”

For hardware, Dell AI Factory with Nvidia combines Dell PowerEdge XE9680, Nvidia H100s, Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet platform, Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs, Dell PowerScale F710 storage, and the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform.

“These high-end workloads are actually demanding high-end data centers, and that makes the perfect fit for us to work with Equinix on this,” Dunn said.

The offer will be rolled out at Equinix’s more than 260 AI-ready data centers that are located across 70 geographies. Miller said customers should be able to power up their AI work in as little as 90 days from order. Inside that window, it could take Dell six to eight weeks to have the hardware available from order to delivery, Dunn said.

Miller (pictured above) said partners are delivering enterprises with faster time to value on their AI projects and this offering can only enable that velocity, along with making it profitable for partners.

“So the great aspect of this is the go-to market will enable customers to purchase this either through their preferred VAR, MSP, Dell partner that sits behind distribution, or it can be a Dell partner that is selling with our direct sales force as well as Dell could do this,” she said. “So we’re trying to make this as available as possible, but we think this is going to have a significant appeal for Dell partners.”

Customers can buy as many as sixteen XE9680s for up to eight racks worth of accelerated AI compute, Dunn said. This collaboration lets customers leverage the potential of generative AI while maintaining control over their data and addressing sustainability goals, Dunn said. He said while the current iteration runs Nvidia’s H100s, Dell will keep pace with GPU advances.

“So you’ll see us transition to the H200s and then, the Blackwell series in the back half of next year for the for the really high end,” he told CRN. “The chip technology is moving so quickly, we’ve got to make sure that systems technology is keeping up with it, and we have that offer in market as quickly as possible.”

Miller said this partnership gives customers platform neutrality and flexibility, interconnection capabilities to all of the public clouds, and more than 2,000 networks and 3,000 cloud and IT companies and service providers that customers can access.

“Not only do you get the benefit of this AI factory, you also get all of the interconnection,” Miller said. “You get all of the sustainability requirements that customers and enterprises are demanding now, and so all of that comes with what you get here, along with the data privacy and the security. So really, this is a very comprehensive solution for enterprises.”