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Things worth reading before you spend anything.
Two checklists we use in our own first conversations. Free, no form, no follow-up sequence — take them and use them, with or without us.
Private AI
Ten questions to answer before you buy a GPU
The interesting decisions in private AI happen before any hardware is ordered. If you can answer these, you can size a platform sensibly. If you cannot, the hardware decision is premature.
- What task is the model doing? Summarising, extracting, classifying, drafting and answering questions over documents are five different jobs with five different hardware answers.
- How sensitive is the input, really? Classify the material before it is indexed. “Just for the pilot” has a way of becoming permanent.
- How many people will use it at once? Concurrency drives capacity far more than headcount does.
- What response time is acceptable? The difference between two seconds and twenty is a difference in cost.
- Where do the documents live today? File share, document management system, mailbox — the answer determines the indexing work.
- Who is allowed to ask what? The assistant should inherit your existing access model, not bypass it.
- What happens when it is confidently wrong? Decide the human review step before anyone relies on the output.
- What power and cooling do you have spare? Usually the real constraint, and often a facilities project rather than an IT one.
- Who owns it after the pilot? A name, not a department.
- What would make you switch it off? If there is no answer, there is no governance.
Also useful
Infrastructure sanity checks
- Restore something this quarter. A backup that has never been restored is a belief.
- Check the licence position against the deployment. Both directions, every year.
- Find the undocumented system. There is one. It is probably load-bearing.
- Look at capacity trends, not capacity. Headroom with no trend line is a guess.
- Confirm who gets paged at 2am. If the answer is nobody in particular, that is the finding.
This section is being rebuilt
Virta’s previous resources page said “coming soon” for more than a decade, which is its own kind of honest. Rather than leave it at that, the two lists above are the material we actually use. More will be added here as we write it: recovery planning checklists, migration preparation notes and the platform cost comparisons we build for clients.
If there is something specific you would find useful, ask us and we will write it up.
No gatekeeping
Why there is no form on this page
Checklists behind an email capture exist to build a mailing list, not to help you. If what is here is useful, that is the whole point — and if it makes you better at evaluating providers, that is a good outcome even when you choose someone else.
If you would like these as a PDF for your own governance pack, ask and we will send one.
Want a second opinion on your answers?
Work through the checklist and send us what you have. We will tell you where the platform decision is being made for you by an unanswered question.