Several of the world’s top server manufacturers today at COMPUTEX 2021 announced new systems powered by NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing units. While systems with NVIDIA GPUs are already available now with the option of adding BlueField-2 DPUs, many applications and customer use cases may not require a GPU but can still benefit from a DPU.
The new servers from ASUS, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, QCT and Supermicro are ideal for enterprises seeking the additional performance, security and manageability that NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs offer.
Servers that primarily run software-defined networking (for example, a stateful load balancer or distributed firewall), software-defined storage or traditional enterprise applications will all benefit from the DPU’s ability to accelerate, offload and isolate infrastructure workloads for networking, security and storage.
Systems running VMware vSphere, Windows or hyperconverged infrastructure solutions also benefit from including a DPU, whether running AI and machine learning applications, graphics-intensive workloads or traditional business applications.
NVIDIA BlueField DPUs shift infrastructure tasks from the CPU to the DPU, making more server CPU cores available to run applications, which increases server and data center efficiency. The DPU places a “computer in front of the computer” for each server, delivering separate, secure infrastructure provisioning that is isolated from the server’s application domain. This allows agentless workload isolation, security isolation, storage virtualization, remote management and telemetry on both virtualized and bare-metal servers.
Customers and software makers can program BlueField DPUs easily using the NVIDIA DOCA SDK, the data-center-on-a-chip architecture that simplifies application development and ensures forward and backward compatibility with the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU, expected in 2022, and all future BlueField DPUs.
Enterprise customers are interested in deploying DPUs in many or even all of their data center servers. The availability of DPU-accelerated servers from leading system builders makes it simple and easy for customers to buy the market-leading BlueField-2 DPU pre-installed and pre-configured with their favorite servers.
BlueField-2 DPU-accelerated servers are expected this year, with several anticipated to submit to the NVIDIA-Certified Systems program when DPU server certification becomes available.
More information is available in the BlueField-2 DPU data sheet.