VMware, Nvidia partner on zero-trust protected servers

VMware and Nvidia announced at the VMware Explore 2022 conference in California that they are collaborating to create a new data center platform that has built-in AI inference, AI modeling and zero-trust security capabilities, which are needed for the coming era of AI, according to ZDNet. The companies plan to bring VMware's vSphere 8 enterprise workload platform, which was newly announced at the event, together with the newest PowerEdge servers by Dell and Nvidia's BlueField-2 data processing units, AI enterprise software and GPUs, with all elements to be made accessible through Nvidia LaunchPad. Providing a firewall for each server is the collaborations main goal as the next step in workload security, says Brad Doctor, vice president of security engineering at VMware. Here we're going to a model where we're going to put a next-generation firewall with [VMware's] NSX into every server rather than running that on a CPU, which is going to offload this to the GPU. So with that, we can do things like intrusion detection and intrusion protection systems, Doctor said. Offloading data to the DPU also allows users to save CPU cycles while maintaining accelerated networking and security services, according to Doctor.