Summary

This joint paper, written by Dell Technologies in collaboration with Intel, outlines the key components of the Intel® Security Solution for Fortanix Confidential AI and the available configurations based on the latest generation of Dell PowerEdge servers.

Introduction

Cybersecurity has become more tightly integrated into business objectives globally, with zero trust security strategies being established to ensure that the technologies being implemented to address business priorities are secure.

Organizations need to accelerate business insights and decision intelligence more securely as they optimize the hardware-software stack. In fact, the seriousness of cyber risks to organizations has become central to business risk as a whole, making it a board-level issue.

Data is your organization’s most valuable asset, but how do you secure that data in today’s hybrid cloud world? How do you keep your sensitive data or proprietary machine learning (ML) algorithms safe with hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) or containers running on a single server?

The Intel® Security Solution for Fortanix Confidential AI, built in collaboration with Fortanix and Dell Technologies, helps contribute to your zero trust security strategy. It is an enterprise-level, high-performance, security-enabled solution that encrypts data while it is in use by isolating data and code in Intel® Software Guard Extension (Intel® SGX) enclaves, without changing underlying software applications.

Key components

• Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX)—A set of security-related instruction codes that isolates software and data from the underlying infrastructure (hardware or operating system) in hardware enclaves. Intel® SGX helps defend against common software-based attacks and helps protect intellectual property (like models) from being accessed and reverse-engineered by hackers or cloud providers.
• Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager—A comprehensive turnkey solution that manages the entire confidential computing environment and enclave life cycle. No application rewriting is required. Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager manages and enforces security policies including identity verification, data access control, and attestation.
• Fortanix Confidential AI—An easy-to-use subscription service that provisions security-enabled infrastructure and software to orchestrate on-demand AI workloads for data teams with a click of a button. Data teams can operate on sensitive datasets and AI models in a confidential compute environment supported by Intel® SGX enclave, with the cloud provider having no visibility into the data, algorithms, or models.
• Dell PERC H755N NVM Express (NVMe) RAID controller with self-encrypting drives (SEDs)—A RAID controller that provides additional security for stored data. Whether drives are lost, stolen, or failed, unauthorized access is prevented by rendering the drive unreadable without the encryption key within the storage controller. The PERC H755N controller offers additional benefits including regulatory compliance and secure decommissioning. It supports local key management (LKM) and external key management systems through Dell OpenManage Secure Enterprise Key Manager (SEKM).

Solution benefits

The Intel® Security Solution for Fortanix Confidential AI enables confidential computing so that AI models and data can be shared without exposing intellectual property and sensitive data. This solution:

• Delivers a turnkey, enterprise-level, and high-performance security solution without requiring application modifications
• Addresses time-to-market concerns by providing a validated solution with an installation guide, containerized tools, and sample workloads

 Whether you are deploying on-premises in the cloud, or at the edge, it is increasingly critical to protect data and maintain regulatory compliance. Accelerate performance across the fastest-growing workload types in AI, analytics, networking, storage and HPC, and help protect your business and innovate with confidence.

 Available configurations

Table 1.       Intel® Security Solution for Fortanix Confidential AI configurations 

* Larger enclave capacity for securing bigger AI models and end-to-end AI workloads

Learn More

Contact your Dell or Intel account team for a customized quote. 1-877-ASK-DELL.

Summary

This joint paper, written by Dell Technologies, in collaboration with Intel^®, describes the key hardware considerations when configuring a successful Elasticsearch deployment and recommends configurations based on the most recent 15th Generation PowerEdge Server portfolio offerings.

Elasticsearch is a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. This proposal contains recommended configurations for Elasticsearch clusters on the Kubernetes platform (Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator) running on 15th Generation Dell PowerEdge with 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake).

 Key Considerations

• Faster and scalable performance. Elasticsearch running on the latest Dell PowerEdge servers is built on high- performing Intel^® architecture and configured with 3rd Generation Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable processors. Indexing is faster and capacity can scale with your needs.
• Index more data. Elasticsearch can handle and store more data by increasing DRAM capacity and using PCIe Gen 4 NVMe disk drives attached to Dell PowerEdge servers.
• Reduced search times and increased # of concurrent searches. As data grows and needs to be accessed across the cluster, data-access response times are critical, especially for real-time analytics applications. Elasticsearch, running on the latest Dell PowerEdge servers, is built on high-performing Intel^® architecture. Intel^® Ethernet network controllers, adapters, and accessories enable agility in the data center and support high throughput and low latency response times.
• Easy and secure installation. The Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator is an official Elasticsearch operator certified on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, providing easy deployment, management, and operation of Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server, Beats, and Enterprise Search on OpenShift clusters. Elasticsearch clusters deployed using this operator are secure by default (with enabled encryption and strong passwords).
• Multi Data Tiers. As data grows, costs do not have to. With multiple tiers of data, capacity can extend, and storage costs can be driven lower without performance loss. Each capacity layer can be scaled independently by using larger drives or mode nodes (or both), depending on customer needs.

Available Configurations

Note: This document may contain language from third-party content that is not under Dell Technologies’ control and is not consistent with current guidelines for Dell Technologies’ own content. When such third-party content is updated by the relevant third parties, this document will be revised accordingly.

Resources

For more information: 

• Contact your Dell or Intel^® account team for a customized quote, at 1-877-ASK-DELL (1-877-275-3355).
• See the following documents:

1. What is Elasticsearch?
2. Data tiers | Elasticsearch Guide

Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes is now a Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operator