SAN FRANCISCO – Nvidia, Dell Technologies, and VMware today announced a new data center offering that combines the "most significant vSphere release that we've ever seen" with Dell PowerEdge servers and Nvidia BlueField 2 data processing units (DPUs) in a move that Nvidia SVP of Networking Kevin Deierling said is "a huge moment for enterprise computing."

"The exciting news that we have to share with you today is that vSphere 8 on Bluefield is here," Deierling said during a press briefing ahead of VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco. The updates to VMware's enterprise workload platform in vSphere 8 are, for the first time, being introduced on "a new accelerated computing platform that runs the infrastructure of the data center, and that's the Bluefield DPU," he explained.

This works because "VMware is the operating system of the enterprise," he said. "And Nvidia is transforming businesses with accelerated computing. And together we're reinventing the data center."

Bluefield GPU is an accelerated computing platform designed to run the infrastructure software of the data center and combine what Nvidia claims are the world's best networking accelerators and embedded ARM CPU cores. This simplifies infrastructure and management, and it increases performance and security, according to Deierling.

"And now this is all fully integrated with vSphere running on the Bluefield GPU. So you get all the value of VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere with the acceleration and security isolation of BlueField GPU," he said.

The challenge with current data science, in Deierling's eyes, is that modern applications like artificial intelligence (AI) create massive amounts of data whose processing tends to suck up CPU cycles.

Another piece of this issue is the increased demand for distributed applications, such as containerized or virtualized apps that consist of microservices spread across the data center.

"We've seen a[n] evolution where companies have moved from really bespoke appliances for networking, security, and storage, and management to a software-defined data center. And VMware has really been at the center of that," Deierling noted. "But one of the challenges there is that with all of that east-west traffic and management and security — you're actually consuming CPU cores."

This means "that CPU capacity is being consumed both 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 actually share all of the data across the entire data set," he explained.

With this data center offering, enterprises can offload workloads to the DPU and thus accelerate networking and security services by saving CPU cycles resource-intensive work the DPU can easily handle. "With vSphere 8.0, we actually have moved that processing," Deierling said.

"The infrastructure management and the security and the storage and the software-defined networking, all of that is now running on the Bluefield [DPU]. It takes advantage both of the CPU cores that I talked about, but also the accelerations. We offload, accelerate, and isolate. And that isolation is super important to deliver the best security of the world," he said.

Hosting VMware's NSX software-defined platform on BlueField "gives us a new layer of isolation between the application processing domain and the infrastructure processing domain. So we're super excited that we've achieved this new milestone with vSphere," Deierling noted.

The vendors claim the combination of their technologies increases performance and efficiency in data center, edge, cloud, and hybrid environments.

“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,” Krish Prasad, SVP and GM of VMware's Cloud Platform Business Unit said.

This offering will provide "next-generation performance and efficiency for mission-critical enterprise cloud applications while better protecting enterprises from lateral threats across multi-cloud environments," Prasad added.

Read all of SDxCentral’s VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.