Nvidia and Dell unveiled an integrated solution at VMware Explore 2022 this week that matches Nvidia BlueField-2 DPUs, GPUs and AI Enterprise software with Dell PowerEdge servers, and is optimized for VMware vSphere 8 enterprise workload platform that also was unveiled at the event.
The combined solution, now available through the Nvidia LaunchPad hands-on lab environment, delivers advanced AI training, AI inference, data processing, data science and zero-trust security capabilities for enterprises that are rapidly expanding their AI use cases and comfort zones. As they continue to do so, they will need to find ways to offload AI applications from overloaded CPUs, and that is what the DPU/GPU/AI software packages running on Dell servers can provide, according to Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at Nvidia.
“If you look at the challenges with today's data centers, you see that with modern applications with massive processing that data is consuming CPU cycles,” he said.
“The increased demand for distributed apps is the other thing that's happened,” he said, explaining that applications have evolved from monolithic, centralized models to virtualized, containerized and distributed applications that have caused an explosion in “East-West” traffic cross-crossing networks. That in turn has led to a need for more distributed security
“With a next generation firewall, we are moving to a distributed model,” Deierling said, adding, “No longer are we really confined to the way that previously data centers were built. Now, you have an edge router or firewall sitting at the perimeter of the data center, and all the traffic inside of the data center to be trusted.”
So, the full extent of what Nvidia, Dell and VMware are trying to enable is an environment where vSphere 8 offloads, accelerates, isolates and better secures data center infrastructure services onto the BlueField DPU, freeing up CPU cycles.
“Distributed modern applications with AI/ML and analytics are driving the transformation of data center architecture by leveraging accelerators and providing better security as part of the mainstream application infrastructure,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. “Dell PowerEdge servers built on the latest VMware vSphere 8 innovations, and accelerated by Nvidia BlueField DPUs, provide next-generation performance and efficiency for mission-critical enterprise cloud applications while better protecting enterprises from lateral threats across multi-cloud environments.”
Nvidia also said that an upcoming release of its AI Enterprise will bring support for new capabilities introduced in VMware vSphere 8, including the ability to support larger multi-GPU workloads, optimize resources and easily manage the GPU lifecycle.
Beyond the LaunchPad availability, Dell servers with vSphere 8 on Nvidia BlueField-2 DPU will be available later in the year.