NVIDIA And VMWare Announce Hybrid Cloud Partnership For AI Software And Hardware Infrastructure
VMWare and NVIDIA announced at VMWorld 2020 that the two companies are teaming up in the datacenter market and in the cloud. The duo is combining their strengths to provide AI software integrations with GPU-accelerated solutions suited for AI and machine learning in conjunction with VMWare's Project Monterey.
VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger states that VMWare is “partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to every enterprise.” The available AI software NVIDIA offers through the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) hub will be brought into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware Tanzu. This integration will make AI adoption, use, and deployment much easier for customers in any industry. All the things one needs to work with AI and machine learning at an enterprise level will be accelerated on NVIDIA GPU infrastructure for flexible, scalable resources that are instantly deployable.
Gelsinger also mentions that “[VMWare is] 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.” The partnership will create “architecture for the hybrid cloud based on SmartNIC technology, including NVIDIA’s programmable BlueField-2 DPU.” According to NVIDIA, the data processing unit “offloads critical network, security, and storage tasks from the CPU,” which, when combined with VMware Cloud Foundation, will create systems “purpose-built for the demands of AI, machine learning, high-throughput, and data-centric apps.” Furthermore, this infrastructure will also enhance other enterprise workloads while doing the same offloading work.
These developments are in perfect alignment with NVIDIA's vigorous efforts in AI and machine, which was recently underscored in statements made during the announcement of the company's acquisition of Arm. “NVIDIA and VMware will help customers transform every enterprise data center into an accelerated AI supercomputer,” notes NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. The new NVIDIA and VMWare partnership should provide significant value at the enterprise level with VMWare's widespread virtualization footprint. This is only the beginning of the discussion though, so stay tuned to HotHardware and wait for GTC2020 on October 5th for more news from NVIDIA and VMWare.
