F5 & MinIO partnership boosts secure hybrid AI data pipelines

F5 and MinIO have announced an expanded partnership to provide solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) data pipelines and AI factories handling large, distributed datasets across edge, cloud, and on-premises platforms.

The partnership centres on the integration of F5's Application Delivery and Security Platform with MinIO's AIStor Enterprise Edition.

The combined solution aims to boost performance, scalability, and reliability for companies working with demanding AI workloads, especially those that involve global data collection and deployment across diverse IT environments.

Hybrid architecture

This joint solution introduces a hybrid multicloud architecture designed to meet requirements around performance, reliability, and data governance for AI initiatives. It supports fast and secure data flows essential for AI model training and inference, while also aiming to reduce costs and avoid latency bottlenecks—a growing concern for enterprises facing escalating public cloud expenses.

The system is set up to provide reliable and resilient data transfers from the edge of networks to central AI factories, all underpinned by security standards designed for enterprise deployment.

By leveraging the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform alongside MinIO's AIStor Enterprise Edition, organisations can manage AI/ML pipelines, data repatriation, replication, and large-scale data storage. The companies believe these capabilities address pain points such as public cloud costs, latency in AI workflows, and the increased need for both security and scalability in data access.

Automotive deployment

A notable use case cited by the companies involves a global automotive manufacturer deepening its investment in the technology to ensure secure data delivery from vehicles to its AI factories. Through F5's secure traffic management, vehicle data is collected and safeguarded during transmission across regional points of presence to the company's central data lakes. Once stored with MinIO's platform, these repositories enable effective AI model training and validation, informing improvements to automotive edge systems such as perception and autonomous decision-making. After the models are trained and validated, updates are delivered back to vehicles, with F5 securing all stages of the process.

This example underscores the pairing of load balancing and data security with high-performance storage, aiming to resolve challenges such as uneven distribution of data loads, unprotected endpoints, and inconsistent performance across networks. The combined solution is engineered to optimise performance by differentiating between wide area and local area network traffic and to support the real-time demands of modern AI applications.

Enterprise applications

The F5 and MinIO partnership aligns with F5's AI Reference Architecture and is aimed at facilitating fine-tuning, model training, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) processes. It offers load balancing for efficiently routing data from multiple sources into AI environments, which is expected to increase speed and resilience for inference and training activities. Organisations operating in sectors such as manufacturing, telecommunications, retail, financial services, and cloud services are among those already deploying the joint platform.

The solution has been developed to address several prominent use cases, specifically:

• Enabling high-throughput, secure pipelines for both batch and real-time AI data ingestion.
• Supporting the repatriation of data from public clouds to private or hybrid environments for cost and compliance management.
• Providing replication, backup, and disaster recovery across multicloud infrastructures, ensuring data availability and security.
• Accelerating model training by ensuring timely access to distributed datasets for AI workflows, including RAG.

"This technology alliance partnership between F5 and MinIO showcases the power of two leading platforms coming together to improve how data is managed, transported, and secured at exascale," said John Maddison, Chief Product and Corporate Marketing Officer at F5. "AI and data-intensive applications require high-performance pipelines, and this solution ensures that organisations can meet those demands while simplifying deployment and reducing TCO—all within a secure and globally interconnected framework."

"Rapid AI adoption is reshaping modern data infrastructures, requiring organisations to reliably scale data storage, while maintaining more control over costs, security, and governance," said Garima Kapoor, co-CEO and co-founder, MinIO. "The partnership between MinIO and F5 provides enterprises with a scalable, secure solution that delivers confidence when deploying and managing their AI initiatives, ensuring data integrity and performance from the edge to the AI factory."

The partnership between F5 and MinIO is being positioned as a means to provide organisations with greater flexibility in dealing with expanding AI infrastructure needs, supporting consistent data handling and model development across distributed environments.