A key focus of VMware by Broadcom at the Explore conference in Las Vegas last week centered around how enterprises can power network performance to drive GPUs and necessary data center infrastructure and deliver artificial intelligence.

This need has been highlighted through an ongoing discussion within the tech community around the merits of various networking protocols, such as Ethernet and InfiniBand, to power high-performance computing. Key executives at Broadcom have made it clear that Ethernet is the way to go.

Broadcom’s Chris Wolf and Ram Velaga talk with theCUBE about network performance.

“When you start thinking about AI, it’s all about distributed computing,” said Ram Velaga (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager for the Core Switching Group at Broadcom Inc. “When you’re doing distributed computing, it’s a lot of GPUs and you have to connect them together with the network. That’s what we do. We look at where AI is going into the enterprise, and we believe it should be built on Ethernet.”

Velaga spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Chris Wolf (left), global head of AI and advanced services, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, at Broadcom, and they discussed bandwidth needs and key trends VMware is seeing among customers interested in the private cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Network performance fuels AI uses cases in cloud

The good news for enterprise IT practitioners is that networking bandwidth has scaled to meet requirements, with a series of increasingly faster processors to power the infrastructure.

“Networking bandwidth has been scaling quite a bit,” Velaga said. “If you just look at our history of chips that we’ve been coming out with in the last few years, we went from 12.8 terabit chips to 25 terabit chips to 50 terabit chips. Most people can predict when we will have a 100-terabit device coming up. So, the network bandwidth is keeping up … it’s ready to take this challenge on.”

While the bandwidth may be there, an open question remains whether a majority of workloads will be in private clouds versus public. One of the key messages from VMware Explore was that the trend is toward private cloud, driven in large part by economics, according to Wolf.

“We know and our customers know they’re paying the public cloud premium for the velocity … and there is a valid use case for that,” Wolf said. “It’s not all or nothing; we don’t expect it to be. But that said, everybody knows if you have a well-run private cloud, and if you can simplify it, your costs on-premises are dramatically lower.”

This dynamic is leading to a redefined role between VMware and hyperscalers as AI workloads migrate to the private cloud.

“What we’re seeing is the customer demand for AI and alignment to our value proposition is now creating new pull for modern applications back onto our platform,” Wolf explained. “That’s changed the dynamic. We even have the hyperscalers talking to us as well about extending their services to the data center or edge on our platform. There’s recognition, I would say, on their side that Private AI is a valid use case even for them and something that they want to address in the market as well.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of VMware Explore:

(* Disclosure: VMware by Broadcom sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE