Nvidia Works With Dell, VMware On Latest vSphere Release: ‘A Huge Moment For Enterprise Computing’

Developed in collaboration with VMware Inc. and Dell Technologies, Nvidia says vSphere 8 on the BlueField DPU will bring the best in artificial intelligence computing.

Nvidia’s data center chops are about to get more powerful thanks to its collaboration with cloud computing and virtualization firm VMware Inc. and tech behemoth Dell Technologies.

The vSphere 8 release on BlueField data processing unit (DPU), Nvidia’s programmable processor focused on data centers, will be released Tuesday and available to channel partners in November from Dell. vSphere is VMware’s cloud computing virtualization platform. It uses the power of virtualization to transform data centers into simplified cloud computing infrastructures, enabling IT organizations to deliver flexible and reliable IT services.

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“This is a huge moment for enterprise computing and the most significant vSphere release we’ve ever seen,” said Kevin Deierling, a senior vice president at Nvidia, in a live video presentation to reporters Friday. “Historically, we’ve seen lots of great new features and capabilities with VMware’s roadmap. But for the first time, we’re introducing all of that goodness running on a new accelerated computing platform that runs the infrastructure of the data center.”

In response to a question from CRN, he said channel partners will not only have access to the same framework they’ve provided that leverages expertise developed on VMware, vSphere, and V Cloud Foundation, but they’ll also have a differentiated offer.

“As you start to look at securing everything in the data center…those capabilities have been there,” Deierling said. “However, they were too expensive, in terms of the efficiency, that you were able to achieve... We built a software-defined, hardware-accelerated architecture that channel partners can leverage.”

This newest DPU is the result of what Deierling called a two-year journey with VMware. It took that long, he said, because talented computer scientists from the companies worked together to problem solve.

Nvidia said one challenge they were trying to solve with this latest version included how to manage all the latest applications such as AI, that generate massive amounts of data and processing that consumes CPU cycles.

“The CPU capacity was being consumed with security aspects moving data around and running massive amounts of east-west traffic to allow these distributed applications to communicate with each other and share all of the data across the entire data set,” he said.

That problem has been solved, he said, with Bluefield GPU, integrated with vSphere.

“This combination simplifies infrastructure and management, boosts performance and strengthens security,” he said.