Dicker Data selects Interactive to host Cisco AI Rally Kit

Interactive has been selected to Dicker Data's Cisco AI Rally Kit at its Sydney data centre, giving Dicker Data's partner ecosystem access to dedicated AI infrastructure to develop and validate real-world use cases under local control.

The kit, which underpins Dicker Data's AI Accelerate program, is powered by NVIDIA GPUs and includes 120TB of storage supplied by Everpure.

Hosted within Interactive's 'sovereign' Sydney facility, it is designed to let organisations experiment with AI workloads, build proof-of-concept projects and assess infrastructure requirements before committing to a production environment.

Eligible partners can access industry-specific use cases through Dicker Data to explore outcomes across different verticals without additional investment. The arrangement is aimed at partners at the beginning of their AI journey who want a practical starting point for assessing private AI.

David Leen, head of product - cloud at Interactive, said while there is no shortage of interest in AI, the harder question for many organisations is understanding where AI can genuinely create value and what it will take to make a use case work in their environment.

"It means organisations can learn more about what their use case demands before making bigger decisions about the infrastructure required to support it in production," Leen said.

Lizzy Jones, head of data and AI at Interactive, said testing against real infrastructure was critical to bridging experimentation and production deployment.

"For private AI in particular, decisions about infrastructure can't be separated from questions around data, security, latency, privacy and sovereignty. Testing a real use case gives organisations a much clearer picture of those requirements before they commit to a production approach," Jones said.

Vickie Madeleine, general manager of Cisco at Dicker Data, said sovereign AI considerations were driving the initiative.

"We believe this practical and accessible way of experiencing Cisco and Everpure infrastructure and AI-specific use cases will help partners unlock AI opportunities, accelerate their learning journey, and build confidence in deploying AI solutions for their customers," Madeleine said.