NVIDIA, VMware announce broad partnership

Source: NVIDIA. Huang (left) and Gelsinger (right) at VMworld 2020.

At VMworld 2020 last week, VMware and NVIDIA announced a broad partnership to deliver both an end-to-end enterprise platform for artificial intelligence (AI) and a new architecture for data centre, cloud and edge that uses NVIDIA's new DPUs (data processing units)- a new type of processor - to support existing and future applications.

Through this collaboration, the rich set of AI software available on the NVIDIA NGC portal, will be integrated into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Tanzu. This will help accelerate AI adoption, enabling enterprises to extend existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations, and deploy AI-ready infrastructure where the data resides, across the data centre, cloud and edge.

Additionally, as part of Project Monterey announced on September 30, the companies will partner to deliver an architecture for the hybrid cloud based on VMware's SmartNIC technology, including NVIDIA’s programmable NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU. The combination of VMware Cloud Foundation and NVIDIA BlueField-2 will offer infrastructure that is purpose-built for the demands of AI, machine learning (ML), high-throughput and data-centric apps, said the two companies. It will also deliver expanded application acceleration beyond AI to all enterprise workloads and provide an extra layer of security through a new architecture that offloads critical data centre services from the CPU to SmartNICs and programmable DPUs.

“We are partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to every enterprise; a true democratisation of one of the most powerful technologies,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware.

“We’re also collaborating to define a new architecture for the hybrid cloud—one purpose built to support the needs and demands of the next generation of applications. Together, we’re positioned to help every enterprise accelerate their use of breakthrough applications to drive their business.”

“AI and machine learning have quickly expanded from research labs to data centres in companies across virtually every industry and geography,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

“NVIDIA and VMware will help customers transform every enterprise data centre into an accelerated AI supercomputer. NVIDIA DPUs will give companies the ability to build secure, programmable, software-defined data centres that can accelerate all enterprise applications at exceptional value.”

Poonen discussed the significance of the VMware collaboration with NVIDIA at a VMWorld media briefing.

In a separate VMworld media briefing Sanjay Poonen, COO VMware, summarised the development as taking NVIDIA's AI and analytics and their AI capabilities for enterprise apps and enabling these to run on the VMware stack. He also shared that this integration is something that customers have been asking for. "We're taking it to vertical use cases where AI is commonly used," he said.

Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA, spoke at a GTC pre-briefingthat VMware is the exemplar of the software-defined data centre. "With this partnership, VMware and NVIDIA are working together to take that software and run it on the Bluefield DPU, thereby freeing up the CPU to (perform) extra functionality," he said.

The first aspect of NVIDIA and VMware’s collaboration – the integration of NVIDIA NGC with VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation will simplify the deployment and management of AI for the most demanding workloads. Industries ranging from healthcare to financial services, retail and manufacturing will be able to easily develop and deploy AI workloads using containers and virtual machines, on the same platform as their enterprise applications, at scale across the hybrid cloud.

As a result, VMware customers will be able to accelerate data science and AI workloads building on existing infrastructure, resources and toolsets – helping to broaden adoption of AI and ML technologies. Data scientists, developers and researchers will gain immediate access to NGC’s cloud-native, GPU-optimised containers, models and industry-specific software development kits. NGC software is supported on pretested NVIDIA A100-powered servers expected from leading system manufacturers, including Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)and Lenovo.

The second element of VMware and NVIDIA’s collaboration recognises that as workloads grow in complexity, SmartNICs and DPUs are critical technologies for securely accelerating enterprise applications where the data resides. VMware and NVIDIA are delivering a new architecture for the hybrid cloud that will help organisations evolve their infrastructure and operations, and also introduce a new security model that offloads hypervisor, networking, security and storage tasks from the CPU to the DPU. This new architecture will also extend the VMware Cloud Foundation operating model to bare-metal servers.

The architecture is the cornerstone of VMware’s Project Monterey, a technical preview announced at VMworld 2020. Leveraging the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU with VMware Cloud Foundation, customers will be able to speed up a wide range of next-gen and general-purpose applications, deliver programmable intelligence and operate a distributed, zero-trust security model across data centres, the edge and telco clouds.

Explore:

Extensive software engineering collaboration on the NVIDIA and VMware enterprise AI and accelerated computing platforms is underway. Companies seeking early access to operationalise AI and securely accelerate applications on their hybrid clouds can sign up for updates on availability.