The data center’s grid is about to plug in to a new source of power.
It rides a kind of network interface card called a SmartNIC. Its smarts and speed spring from an ASIC called a data processing unit.
In short, the DPU packs the power of data center infrastructure on a chip.
DPU-enabled SmartNICs will be available for millions of virtualized servers thanks to a collaboration between VMware and NVIDIA. They bring advances in security and storage as well as networking that will stretch from the core to the edge of the corporate network.
What’s more, the companies announced a related initiative that will put the power of the public AI cloud behind the corporate firewall. It enables enterprise AI managed with familiar VMware tools.
Lighting Up the Modern Data Center
Together, these efforts will give users the choice to run machine learning workloads in containers or virtual machines, secured and managed with familiar VMware tools. And they will create a new sweet spot in hybrid cloud computing with greater control, lowered costs and the highest performance.
Laying the foundation for these capabilities, the partnership will help users build more secure and powerful distributed networks inside VMware Cloud Foundation, powered by the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU. It’s the Swiss Army knife of data center infrastructure that can accelerate security, storage, networking, and management tasks, freeing up CPUs to focus on enterprise applications.
The DPU’s jobs include:
- Blocking malware
- Advanced encryption
- Network virtualization
- Load balancing
- Intrusion detection and prevention
- Data compression
- Packet switching
- Packet inspection
- Managing pools of solid-state and hard-disk storage
Our DPUs can run these tasks today across two ports, each carrying traffic at 100 Gbit/second. That’s an order of magnitude faster than CPUs geared for enterprise apps. The DPU is taking on these jobs so CPU cores can run more apps, boosting vSphere and data center efficiency.
As a result, data centers can handle more apps and their networks will run faster, too.
“The BlueField-2 SmartNIC is a fundamental building block for us because we can take advantage of its DPU hardware for better network performance and dramatically reduced cost to operate data center infrastructure,” said Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO of VMware’s cloud platform group.
Securing the Data Center with DPUs
DPUs also will usher in a new era of advanced security.
Today, most companies run their security policies on the same CPUs that run their applications. That kind of multitasking leaves IT departments vulnerable to malware or attacks in the guise of a new app.
With the BlueField DPU, all apps and requests can be vetted on a processor isolated from the application domain, enforcing security and other policies. Many cloud computing services already use this approach to create so-called zero-trust environments where software authenticates everything.
VMware is embracing SmartNICs in its products as part of an initiative called Project Monterey. With SmartNICs, corporate data centers can take advantage of the same advances Web giants enjoy.
“These days the traditional security perimeter is gone. So, we believe you need to root security in the hardware of the SmartNIC to monitor servers and network traffic very fast and without performance impacts,” said Colbert.
See DPUs in Action at VMworld
The companies are demonstrating these capabilities this week at VMworld. For example, the demo below shows how virtual servers running VMware ESXi clients can use Bluefield-2 DPUs to stop a distributed denial-of-service attack in a server cluster.
Leading OEMs are already preparing to bring the capabilities of DPUs to market. NVIDIA also plans to support BlueField-2 SmartNICs across its portfolio of platforms including its EGX systems for enterprise and edge computing.
You wouldn’t hammer a nail with a monkey wrench or pound in a screw with a hammer — you need to use the right tool for the job. To build the modern data center network, that means using an NVIDIA DPU enabled by VMware.
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