How VMware and NVIDIA are Unlocking AI for Every Enterprise

At VMworld 2020, VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger and NVIDIA President and CEO, Jensen Huang, made a major announcement about their new strategic partnership and the upcoming integration of NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) with VMware vSphere, Cloud Foundation, and Tanzu.  

To help partners understand why this news is being met with such excitement, I just want to give you a quick overview of the announcement and what this new development means for your business and customers.

The Mission

 In simple terms, VMware and NVIDIA have joined forces to help customers transform their data centre into what is effectively, an AI supercomputer. Their plan is to empower enterprises and help them automate and accelerate their business and products, by integrating NVIDIA’s powerful, AI computing platform and optimised AI application frameworks, onto the VMware platforms which customers are already using.

The Benefits

The integration of NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) with VMware vSphere, Cloud Foundation, and Tanzu will have a number of benefits for customers, including:

·       Speeding up time-to-solution

·       Reducing hardware costs

·       Simplifying high-performance app deployment for remote workers

·       Access to NVIDIA containers, AI models, and specialist software

What is NGC?

NGC is a GPU-optimised software hub that accelerates and simplifies deep learning (DL), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC) workflows. It allows users to build solutions faster, so they can focus on gathering insights to deliver more business value.

VMware and NVIDIA have not stated the exact date for when this integration will become generally available, but what is clear is that their aim is to bring enterprise AI to the virtualisation space, so businesses can quickly and easily deploy AI-ready infrastructure on-premises, in the cloud, in the data centre, or at the edge.

Conclusion

The most important point to take away from this latest announcement is that this strategic partnership will enable customers in virtual and hybrid environments, to accelerate and simplify the deployment of AI workloads in containers and virtual machines, running alongside their enterprise applications on VMware platforms.

And with NVIDIA’s acquisition of Mellanox in 2019, then ARM Holdings last month, and now this expansion of their software capabilities with VMware; I think it’s absolutely clear that NVIDIA’s aim is to become core to every aspect of the data centre.

You can catch up on the key takeaways from VMworld 2020 in Arrow’s Channel Advisor.

If you’d like more information about anything mentioned in this blog, get in touch at [email protected].