F5 & Intel join forces to boost AI security & performance

F5 has announced a collaboration with Intel to enhance the security and delivery of AI deployments. This partnership aims to address the increasing need for robust and efficient AI applications in various industries.

The collaboration leverages Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) and OpenVINO toolkit with F5’s NGINX Plus to offer improved security and performance for AI deployments. The integration is designed to ensure that organisations can deploy AI solutions with enhanced simplicity, scalability, and security.

As companies increasingly adopt AI for intelligent applications and workflows, the requirement for secure and efficient AI inference grows. Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit optimises and accelerates AI model inference, while F5’s NGINX Plus offers robust traffic management and security. This combination aims to ease deployment for developers by enabling a "write-once, deploy-anywhere" approach.

The OpenVINO toolkit optimises models from a variety of frameworks, making it more straightforward for developers to create scalable AI solutions with minimal code changes. The toolkit works in conjunction with F5 NGINX Plus, which acts as a reverse proxy, managing traffic and ensuring high availability. Additionally, NGINX Plus provides active health checks and supports SSL termination and mTLS encryption to secure communications between applications and AI models without sacrificing performance.

Intel’s IPUs play a significant role in this integrated solution by offloading infrastructure services from the host CPU. This frees up resources for AI model servers, thereby enhancing the scalability and performance of both NGINX Plus and OpenVINO Model Servers (OVMS). This is particularly beneficial for edge applications like video analytics and IoT, where low latency and high performance are essential. Running NGINX Plus on Intel’s IPUs ensures rapid responses, making it ideal for content delivery networks and distributed microservices deployments.

Kunal Anand, Chief Technology Officer at F5, commented on the collaboration, stating, “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 Intel’s Network and Edge Group, also weighed in, saying, “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.”

This joint solution is now available for enterprises looking to enhance their AI deployments. The partnership between F5 and Intel represents a step towards more secure, efficient, and scalable AI applications across various sectors.