NVIDIA and VMware are marking another milestone in their collaboration to develop an AI-ready enterprise platform that brings the world’s leading AI stack and optimized software to the infrastructure used by hundreds of thousands of enterprises worldwide.
Today at VMworld 2021, VMware announced an upcoming update to VMware vSphere with Tanzu, the industry’s leading virtualization platform and the fastest way for IT teams to get started with Kubernetes workloads on existing infrastructure.
Enterprises can now run trials of their AI projects using vSphere with Tanzu in conjunction with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite. Availability announced in August 2021, NVIDIA AI Enterprise is an end-to-end, cloud-native suite of AI and data analytics frameworks and tools optimized, certified and supported by NVIDIA to enable the rapid deployment, management and scaling of AI applications in the modern hybrid cloud.
AI Virtualization Submission to Industry MLPerf Benchmark
Today’s news follows on Dell Technologies’ recent MLPerf benchmark achievement of 94.4% to 100% of the equivalent bare metal performance running NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere with three NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in a Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 server.
The submission is the second time a vendor has submitted MLPerf results on virtualized infrastructure, and reflects how NVIDIA AI Enterprise is designed to power advanced AI workloads on accelerated industry-standard center servers in the modern data center.
AI and IT: Better Together
Modern AI workloads can demand specialized infrastructure and software, creating complexity for IT teams working to support these advanced application requirements within enterprise data centers and hybrid clouds. By bridging the gap between the worlds of IT operations, data scientists and application developers, NVIDIA AI Enterprise simplifies the AI development lifecycle to help customers get projects into production faster.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere with Tanzu enable developers to run AI workloads on Kubernetes containers within their VMware environments, leveraging infrastructure easily managed by IT. The software runs on mainstream, NVIDIA-Certified Systems from leading server manufacturers, providing an integrated, complete stack of software and hardware optimized for AI.
“VMware serves enterprises by simplifying infrastructure complexity, and our collaboration with NVIDIA enables customers to develop and deploy advanced AI applications on their hybrid clouds,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing for the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware. “With NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere with Tanzu, customers can manage AI development and deployment on mainstream data center servers and clouds, making it easy to integrate the AI applications powering growth in every industry.”
Enterprise-Grade AI for Developers and IT
NVIDIA AI Enterprise provides developer-optimized AI software such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, NVIDIA TensorRT, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server and NVIDIA RAPIDS. These tools make it easy for AI developers and data scientists to access tools and frameworks needed to build a host of enterprise AI applications such as conversational AI, computer vision and recommender systems.
The cloud-native architecture of NVIDIA AI Enterprise enables IT to centrally manage all clusters and apps across their hybrid cloud infrastructure. The software delivers near-bare-metal AI performance — even in virtualized environments — so that IT teams can help developers be able to rapidly explore ideas and iterate as they build their models.
Broad Ecosystem of Customer Choice
NVIDIA AI Enterprise is supported by a broad range of server manufacturers offering NVIDIA-Certified Systems. These include Atos, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, New H3C Information Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Inspur Electronic Information, Lenovo and Supermicro, all of which feature NVIDIA GPUs such as the NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA A30.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise is available from worldwide NVIDIA channel partners including Atea, Axians, Carahsoft Technology Corp., Computacenter, Insight Enterprises, NTT, Presidio, Sirius, SoftServe, SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH, TD SYNNEX, Trace3 and WWT. To support customers needing instant access to AI infrastructure, NVIDIA AI Enterprise is also expected to be coming soon to the NVIDIA AI LaunchPad program available with digital infrastructure leader Equinix.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise is generally available for VMware vSphere, and evaluation licenses are available for customers who would like to trial NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere with Tanzu. The Dell Technologies Validated Design for AI, the first jointly engineered solution of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software on VMware vSphere, is also available today.
Customers interested in learning more can tune into the NVIDIA and VMware executive presentation on making AI available to every enterprise, our joint update on enterprise AI and additional NVIDIA sessions at VMworld 2021, held online Oct. 5-7.
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