VMworld 2020: VMware partners to accelerate enterprise applications

The VMworld 2020 virtual event has kicked off with VMware announcing a collaboration with Nvidia, which the pair hope will deliver low-cost accelerated computing for the enterprise.

The two companies have announced that they will work on a new architecture for datacentre, cloud and edge computing.

Through the partnership, Nvidia’s NGC hub will be integrated into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Tanzu. According to VMware, this will help accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, enabling enterprises to extend existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations and deploy AI-ready infrastructure where the data resides, across the datacentre, cloud and edge.

The collaboration will make use of Nvidia’s data processing units (DPUs), Nvidia’s BlueField-2 programmable next-generation infrastructure and VMware Cloud to accelerate enterprise applications.

“AI and machine learning have quickly expanded from research labs to datacentres in companies across virtually every industry and geography,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

“Nvidia and VMware will help customers transform every enterprise datacentre into an accelerated AI supercomputer. Nvidia DPUs will give companies the ability to build secure, programmable, software-defined datacentres that can accelerate all enterprise applications at exceptional value.”

Along with the partnership with Nvidia, VMware has also expanded its support for multi-clouds, positioning itself as the software company that will make Kubernetes enterprise-ready.

In his opening keynote at the start of the Digital VMworld event, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger discussed why delegates need to drive forward digital innovation.

“If we fail to take a step back and think deeply about the future we want to build together, that would be a huge missed opportunity,” he said.

Gelsinger referenced the extraordinary and challenging circumstances of 2020 and suggested that business is amidst a fundamental rethink centred around digital innovation. 

For Gelsinger and VMware, Kubernetes is going to become the enterprise platform for modern applications, in a similar way to how Java and Spring became the de facto standards for software development. “Kubernetes is the de facto API [application programming interface] for multi-cloud – just like Java two decades ago,” he said. “We are working with the open source community to make Kubernetes enterprise consumable and easy to implement.”

This is through VMware Tanzu, which has now expanded its reach across VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, as well as a partnership with GitLab to improve the speed with which code can be pushed into production.

VMware said it has signed up 75 partners to the Tanzu community, with hundreds of customers now using Tanzu products and a million containers in production. VMware said it is supporting millions of developers every month as they start new projects using the Spring framework for microservices and the Bitnami community catalog for container images.