F5 & Intel collaborate to boost AI security & performance

F5 has announced a new collaboration with Intel to enhance the security and delivery of artificial intelligence (AI) services. This partnership aims to combine F5’s NGINX Plus with Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit and Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) to deliver superior protection, scalability, and performance for advanced AI inference.

As AI adoption grows amongst organisations for intelligent applications and workflows, the need for efficient and secure AI inference has become increasingly important. The joint solution utilises the OpenVINO toolkit, which optimises and accelerates AI model inference alongside F5’s NGINX Plus, providing robust traffic management and security.

The OpenVINO toolkit enables a write-once, deploy-anywhere approach, simplifying the optimisation of models from almost any framework. This is particularly beneficial for developers aiming to create scalable and efficient AI solutions with minimal code alterations.

Enhancing this setup, F5’s NGINX Plus acts as a reverse proxy to manage traffic, ensure high availability, and provide active health checks. It also facilitates SSL termination and mTLS encryption, securing communications between applications and AI models without compromising performance.

Intel’s IPUs further bolster performance by offloading infrastructure services from the host CPU, liberating resources for AI model servers. These IPUs effectively manage infrastructure tasks, enhancing the scalability and performance of both NGINX Plus and OpenVINO Model Servers (OVMS).

This newly integrated solution is designed to be particularly useful for edge applications such as video analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT), where low latency and high performance are essential. Running NGINX Plus on the Intel IPU aids in ensuring rapid and reliable responses, making it ideal for content delivery networks and distributed microservices deployments.

Kunal Anand, Chief Technology Officer at F5, commented on the partnership: “Teaming up with Intel empowers us to push the boundaries of AI deployment. This collaboration highlights our commitment to driving innovation and delivers a secure, reliable, and scalable AI inference solution that will enable enterprises to securely deliver AI services at speed. Our combined solution ensures that organisations can harness the power of AI with superior performance and security.”

Pere Monclus, Chief Technology Officer of Network and Edge Group at Intel, also reflected on the benefits of the collaboration: “Leveraging the cutting-edge infrastructure acceleration of Intel IPUs and the OpenVINO toolkit alongside F5 NGINX Plus can help enable enterprises to realise innovative AI inference solutions with improved simplicity, security, and performance at scale for multiple vertical markets and workloads.”

Pratik Shah, Managing Director for India and SAARC at F5, expressed views on the AI landscape in India: “When it comes to AI, we are witnessing an exciting time in India, as more and more businesses are adopting AI to automate their processes, gain faster insights, enhance product development, and achieve competitive advantage. This partnership underscores our dedication to providing enterprises with advanced solutions that not only enhance performance but also ensures robust security. By integrating Intel's toolkit and processing units with F5’s NGINX Plus, we are offering a comprehensive, scalable, and secure AI inference solution.”