Architecting IT Estates

for Maximum AI Impact

Drive innovation in a colocated cloud with purpose-built compute
Contents
Getting started with AI 3

Chapter 1 
Designing a purpose-built IT estate for AI 4
Optimizing workloads for impact

Chapter 2 
Using the right instances and compute environments 6
Purpose-built hardware for AI
Better together: Azure + Intel

Chapter 3 
Take the first steps to colocating in Azure 9
 Architecting IT Estates for Maximum AI Impact 3

Getting started with AI

Today, AI is driving a strategic shift across industries. Organizations see
themselves using AI to power innovation and access deeper insights.
Unfortunately, many of their current IT estates weren’t designed to handle
the demands of AI workloads. Trying to deploy AI on outdated and disparate
systems results in performance bottlenecks, wasted investments, inefficient
resource usage, and missed opportunities.
When organizations fail to modernize their IT estates, they risk falling behind as outdated systems struggle to
support the data processing and scalability AI requires. To truly unlock AI’s potential, companies must migrate
their infrastructure, databases, and applications to the same cloud—an approach known as colocation.

Migration and colocation in the cloud are the first steps to laying a seamless foundation for innovation,
allowing organizations to overcome common on-premises challenges.

Cost management and resource inefficiencies: Controlling rising costs, including services,
hardware, software, and energy consumption, while meeting fluctuating compute demands.

Security and compliance risks: Ensuring robust cybersecurity measures and maintaining
regulatory compliance across outdated and modern systems.

Data silos and integration issues: Breaking down data silos and integrating legacy systems
to enable seamless AI adoption and data-driven decision-making.

Infrastructure limitations and technical debt: Overcoming the limitations of outdated systems,
retiring technical debt, and mitigating disruptions from the end of software or hardware support.

Operational inefficiencies and management complexity: Simplifying complex AI environments

and reducing high management overhead to improve productivity and agility.

Because AI demands substantial computational power and speed, there’s an additional layer of this foundation
to consider—the compute environments. Using purpose-built processors and virtual machines can further
drive significant AI performance improvements, ensuring AI workloads are optimized for speed and efficiency.
Underpinning the entire foundation is robust code-to-code security, which helps ensure compliance and
protection against emerging cyber threats.

Use this e-book to examine the foundational layers for architecting maximum AI impact, then begin your
journey to building a purpose-built IT estate for AI innovation. By using these strategies, your organization will
be better positioned to achieve AI success, boost agility, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.
 Architecting IT Estates for Maximum AI Impact 4

Designing a purpose-built IT estate for AI

To get the most value from AI initiatives, organizations must first overcome the limitations of outdated IT systems.
Migration and colocation are the essential first steps in redesigning your IT estate to drive successful AI outcomes.

Migration is about more than Colocation is a strategic

moving workloads to the cloud—it’s approach that brings all databases,
about building a flexible foundation infrastructure, and applications
that scales to meet demand, together in the same cloud, creating
reduces spending on hardware and a unified environment that simplifies
maintenance, and provides advanced management, promotes collaboration,
security across workloads. and ensures seamless integration.

This consolidated redesign of your IT estate offers your teams the best setup for AI success by providing
dynamic scalability and reducing the complexity of managing multiple, disconnected systems. By colocating
in Azure, your organization can better allocate resources, minimize inefficiencies, and reduce operational costs.
Colocation also helps ensure seamless access to data and comprehensive security and threat detection, which
are crucial for running AI-driven workloads securely.
 Architecting IT Estates for Maximum AI Impact 5

Optimizing workloads for impact

Improve workload performance
Migrating workloads like Windows Server, SQL
with advanced processors
Server, VMware, Linux, and PostgreSQL to optimized,
purpose-built Azure environments is a key strategy Intel® Xeon® processors are built
for accelerating AI success. These workloads play to handle complex computations
a vital role in day-to-day operations, and moving them quickly so you can rapidly
to modern, cloud-based environments like Azure can complete tasks involving large
help your organization equip your teams for AI while datasets or intricate algorithms.
keeping costs in check. But that’s just the beginning.
Equipped with AI-specific
By using Intel Xeon processors and virtual
® ® features, these processors boost
machines, you can further optimize those workloads performance by reducing the
for speed, performance, and efficiency—ensuring time and resources required for
AI initiatives can provide a true advantage in training and inference.
a highly competitive landscape. Intel® processors dynamically
Advanced processors significantly enhance allocate resources based on
performance across various workloads, improving workload needs, ensuring AI
efficiency and scalability in key environments. applications get the compute
For Windows Server and SQL Server, they boost power required when needed.
database query performance, which is vital for AI Built-in features like encryption
applications that rely on real-time data processing. help safeguard data and
applications from unauthorized
In VMware environments, processors optimized
access and cyber threats.
for virtualization allow multiple AI workloads to
run simultaneously without any performance
degradation, making it easier to scale and manage
resources. For Linux and PostgreSQL, processors
that support open-source optimizations help
enhance both the performance and security
of AI applications operating on these platforms.
 Architecting IT Estates for Maximum AI Impact 6

Using the right instances and

compute environments
After successfully migrating and colocating your
infrastructure, databases, and applications in the
Select the right CPUs and accelerators
cloud, the next step in creating a powerful foundation
for optimal AI impact
for AI is using purpose-built compute environments.
Enhance performance with more
This element is crucial because the right compute advanced processing and reduced latency.
architecture can optimize AI performance, reduce
operational costs, and provide the scalability needed Lower costs by enabling more
for AI workloads. While migration and colocation set efficient resource utilization and
reduced energy consumption.
the stage for AI, the choice of compute environments
is what truly powers AI success. Improve scalability for handling larger
datasets and more complex models.
Compute architecture plays a vital role in how
efficiently AI models process data and perform
tasks. AI workloads can suffer from slower training
times, higher costs, and limited scalability without
Purpose-built hardware for AI
optimized compute environments.
Selecting the right CPUs and accelerators is key to getting
With AI technologies advancing rapidly,
the most out of your AI workloads. Purpose-built CPUs
organizations must consider their algorithmic
and accelerators accelerators developed by Intel are
and hardware needs to maximize performance.
designed specifically for these high-performance tasks.

Your CPU handles a wide range of tasks, such as data

preprocessing, while accelerators are optimized for
Architecting for processor and virtual parallel processing, making them ideal for handling
machine environments the heavy computational demands of AI. By using
the right combination of these components, your
Migration and colocation in Azure create organization can significantly enhance your AI
a seamless foundation in the cloud, but applications’ speed, efficiency, and scalability.
another key layer to this foundation includes
using purpose-built Intel® Xeon® processor Drawing on the strengths of both CPUs and
instances to drive significant AI performance accelerators allows AI systems to process larger
gains further. By incorporating Intel-powered datasets and more complex models without a drop
environments into your IT architecture, you in performance. This leads to faster training times,
can unlock faster data processing, greater reduced latency, and lower operational costs, as
scalability, and improved security—enabling tasks are completed more quickly and efficiently.
Additionally, this scalability ensures that as AI
AI innovation that delivers real business value.
workloads grow, the infrastructure can scale to meet
increased demand without costly system overhauls.
 Architecting IT Estates for Maximum AI Impact 7

Better together: Azure + Intel VMware on Azure can use Intel® Xeon® Scalable
processors to deliver high-performance, scalable,
and secure virtualized environments, enabling
organizations to maximize the potential of AI-driven
Azure provides the secure cloud foundation,
workloads. These processors boost the efficiency
while Intel provides the processing power.
of VMware environments by offering advanced
Together, they create the optimal platform
capabilities for running high-performance computing
for driving AI success.
(HPC) applications. Meanwhile, built-in accelerators
on Intel processors, such as Intel AMX, further boost
AI performance for tasks like image classification,
Intel® Xeon® processors are specifically designed to video analytics, and natural language processing.
handle complex AI tasks with precision and efficiency.
Linux workloads—especially those involving web
This design ensures that AI workloads run seamlessly,
servers and containerized applications—gain
using advanced features like deep learning and
improved scalability and efficiency, ensuring AI
hardware-enhanced security. While delivering
applications can operate smoothly even as demands
market-leading performance per dollar and power
grow. Meanwhile, PostgreSQL databases experience
efficiency to help lower your total ownership cost.
faster query processing and better management of
large datasets, making them well-suited for data
Power your infrastructure, databases, and virtual
warehousing and real-time analytics. This supports
desktops with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
more effective AI use cases, where fast access to
Accelerate AI deep learning training and data and insights is critical to business success.
inferencing workloads with Intel® Advanced
Matrix Extensions (AMX). Underlying all these solutions is a comprehensive
approach to security, from code to cloud.
Addresses data protection needs by encrypting Microsoft and Intel offer robust security solutions
memory at runtime with Intel® Total Memory that provide end-to-end protection for cloud-native
Encryption (Intel® TME). workloads. Tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Data can be protected actively in the processor strengthen your security posture, safeguard workloads
and memory with Intel® Software Guard across multiple cloud environments, and reduce risk
Extensions (SGX). throughout the application lifecycle. Additionally, Intel®
Total Memory Encryption addresses data protection
Select the best public cloud instances for workloads
needs by encrypting memory content at runtime using
with help from Intel® Cloud Optimizer by Densify.
the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) AES-XTS algorithms. For AI to succeed, trusted
Azure uses Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors to and responsible AI practices must be in place, ensuring
optimize performance across Windows Server, SQL compliance and security so that both employees and
Server, VMware, Linux, and PostgreSQL workloads. customers can have confidence in AI systems.
These processors enhance virtualization and cloud
services for Windows Server, making them ideal for
enterprise applications and remote desktop services.
SQL Server workloads gain faster data processing,
allowing for high-performance analytics and
transaction processing, crucial for driving AI insights.
 Architecting IT Estates for Maximum AI Impact 8

Migrate and colocate with Azure Optimize with Intel

Bring your infrastructure, databases, and Use purpose-built processor instances by Intel to
apps to the Azure cloud to eliminate silos, enhance performance, improve scalability, and
reduce complexity, and save on costs. maximize resource allocation for AI workloads.

36% Average of cost savings compared Intel® Xeon® processors power Azure virtual
to the leading cloud provider machines (VMs) running Windows Server,
delivering high performance and reliability for
Windows The Azure Hybrid Benefit discount offers applications and services hosted in the cloud.
Server Windows Servers customers additional savings.

45%
Azure SQL Server VMs, optimized with Intel
improvement in productivity
hardware, provide fast data processing and
efficient database management, making
IT teams report higher levels of productivity for them ideal for business-critical applications.
SQL in-house DBAs and significant improvement in
Server IT efficiency after migrating to Azure SQL Server.

30%
Azure VMware Solution, powered by Intel,
lower infrastructure costs
allows businesses to run VMware workloads
in the Azure cloud, offering a seamless way to
Using Azure VMware Solution, organizations migrate and manage VMware environments
VMWare
saw a decrease in infrastructure costs while with the added benefits of Azure scalability
also seeing 45% greater efficiency for IT and Intel’s performance.
infrastructure teams.

30%
reduction in data Azure supports a variety of Linux
center spend distributions on Intel-powered VMs,
enabling developers to run their
Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure preferred Linux environments with
Linux significantly reduced the cost of licensing, the enhanced performance and security
hardware infrastructure, facility, operational, of Intel technology.
and maintenance costs.
Take the first steps to colocating in Azure
Success with AI isn’t just about implementing cutting-edge algorithms or developing innovative models.
It’s about having a solid, flexible cloud foundation that enables rapid innovation, scales to meet growing
demands, and ensures seamless integration across your IT estate. Once your infrastructure, data, and apps
are colocated in Azure, you can use powerful AI tools like OpenAI and Copilot. These tools empower teams
with natural language processing (NLP), automation, and enhanced productivity, helping to streamline
workflows, accelerate decision-making, and unlock new insights.

Azure and Intel, when combined, offer a comprehensive solution to create this foundation for AI success.

1
Migrating and colocating to Azure and using powerful purpose-built Intel® Xeon® processors enables
the scalability and data processing power needed to optimize AI-driven workloads. Together, these
two components allow your teams to unlock the full potential of AI, making your systems more agile,
productive, and capable of driving real business value.

2
Protect data at every stage, whether at rest, in transit, or in use. Microsoft offers best-in-class security
solutions to help safeguard workloads and reduce risks throughout the application lifecycle.
Meanwhile, Intel® Security Engines, built into Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, deliver enhanced security
capabilities that allow even the most sensitive data to be available for AI analysis, training,
or processing while remaining private and confidential. Recently recognized as a leader in the Frost
Radar Cloud Workload Protection Platforms report, Microsoft provides the security to ensure your
AI initiatives are trusted, responsible, and fully compliant.

Get expert guidance and unlock funding for

a secure migration to Azure. Learn more

Accelerate cloud and AI innovation with

Intel® Xeon® processors. Learn more

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