Nvidia Corp. said today it’s partnering with Dell Technologies Inc. to help enterprises “supercharge” the performance of virtualized workloads powered by VMware Inc.’s vSphere 8.

The chipmaker said it’s able to do this by pairing its specialized Nvidia BlueField data processing units, graphics processing units and AI Enterprise software with Dell’s high-end PowerEdge servers in a combined offering that’s optimized for VMware vSphere 8.

It’s an interesting combination that promises to deliver some major benefits to enterprises. Announced at VMware Explore 2022, VMware’s vSphere 8 has been optimized to run on Nvidia’s DPUs, which are designed to offload, isolate, accelerate and secure data center infrastructure services.

That frees up other resources, such as central processing units and GPUs, to focus solely on what they do best: processing artificial intelligence and other data center workloads. It all adds up to much faster processing and cheaper costs.

At the same time, the DPU ensures greater data security for edge, cloud and multicloud environments, the companies promised.

“AI and zero-trust security are powerful forces driving the world’s enterprises to rearchitect their data centers as computing and networking workloads are skyrocketing,” said Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia. “VMware vSphere 8 offloads, accelerates, isolates and better secures data center infrastructure services onto the NVIDIA BlueField DPU, and frees the computing resources to process the intelligence factories of the world’s enterprises.”

Uniquely, the new PowerEdge servers will also support Nvidia’s AI Enterprise platform. It’s a suite of AI development tools and frameworks that makes it simpler for companies to create and run AI workloads either on-premises or in the cloud.

Nvidia AI Enterprise incorporates vSphere 8, meaning companies can virtualize AI workloads and run them across Nvidia-certified systems, such as the new PowerEdge servers. That makes it easier to deploy the infrastructure where the data resides, meaning AI models can be trained faster. Companies can also manage all of their AI initiatives through a single platform.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Dell is a key partner for enterprises that need to operate workloads on-premises and that includes many AI workloads. “It’s another opportunity for Nvidia to position its AI platform while also showing off its newer DPU capabilities,” Mueller said. “It’s one thing to launch a promising new offering like this and quite another to take it live with real-world customers, so this is what Dell, Nvidia and VMware will need to demonstrate.”

Support for Dell’s new PowerEdge servers will come soon via an update to Nvidia AI Enterprise, which will also add capabilities such as the ability to support larger multi-GPU workloads.

The Dell PowerEdge servers with vSphere 8 on Nvidia BlueField-2 DPU will be made generally available later this year, but in the meantime enterprises will be able to get to grips with the systems through Nvidia LaunchPad — a new, hands-on lab program that provides access to the offering starting today.

Images: Nvidia