F5 has announced a new collaboration with Intel to boost the security and efficiency of AI deployments. This partnership is designed to meet the growing demand for advanced AI applications across various industries.

By combining Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) and the OpenVINO toolkit with F5’s NGINX Plus, the partnership aims to enhance both the security and performance of AI deployments. This integration promises to simplify and scale AI solutions, providing organizations with robust security and seamless deployment capabilities.

As AI becomes increasingly integral to intelligent applications and workflows, the need for secure and efficient AI inference grows. Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit accelerates and optimizes AI model inference, while F5’s NGINX Plus delivers superior traffic management and security. Together, they facilitate a “write-once, deploy-anywhere” approach, simplifying deployment for developers.

The OpenVINO toolkit enhances models from various frameworks, enabling developers to build scalable AI solutions with minimal code adjustments. It works seamlessly with F5 NGINX Plus, which manages traffic as a reverse proxy and ensures high availability. NGINX Plus also provides active health checks and supports SSL termination and mTLS encryption, securing communications between applications and AI models without compromising performance.

Intel’s IPUs significantly contribute to this solution by offloading infrastructure tasks from the host CPU, freeing up resources for AI model servers. This improves the scalability and performance of both NGINX Plus and OpenVINO Model Servers (OVMS), especially for edge applications like video analytics and IoT, where low latency and high performance are crucial. Running NGINX Plus on Intel’s IPUs ensures fast responses, making it ideal for content delivery networks and distributed microservices.

Kunal Anand, Chief Technology Officer at F5, commented, “Partnering with Intel allows us to push the boundaries of AI deployment. This collaboration underscores our dedication to innovation, delivering a secure, reliable, and scalable AI inference solution that enables enterprises to deploy AI services swiftly and securely. Our combined solution ensures organizations can leverage AI with enhanced performance and security.”

Pere Monclus, Chief Technology Officer of Intel’s Network and Edge Group, added, “Combining Intel IPUs’ advanced infrastructure acceleration and the OpenVINO toolkit with F5 NGINX Plus enables enterprises to achieve innovative AI inference solutions with greater simplicity, security, and performance across various markets and workloads.”

This integrated solution is now available for enterprises seeking to elevate their AI deployments. The F5-Intel partnership marks a significant advance toward more secure, efficient, and scalable AI applications across diverse sectors.