Dell, Nvidia and VMware partner to boost data center speed

At the VMware Explore conference today, Dell Technologies and Nvidia are officially announcing the launch of a new data center solution that integrates Dell PowerEdge servers, the new VMware vSphere 8 virtualization platform, alongside Nvidia GPUs and for the first time Nvidia BlueField 2 DPUs (data processing unit) as well.

A DPU is a dedicated piece of silicon hardware designed to handle certain data processing tasks. Those tasks can include security and network routing for data traffic, in an approach that is intended to help reduce the load on CPUs and GPUs for core computing tasks related to a given workload. VMware had been working together with Nvidia on an effort known as Project Monterey for the last two years to enable the vSphere virtualization platform to support the BlueField DPUs and that effort has finally come to fruition.

“Modern applications such as AI, are continuing to generate massive amounts of data and processing that data is consuming CPU cycles,” Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking at Nvidia explained during a press briefing.