VMware and Nvidia team up on AI-powered hybrid cloud platform

VMware institutionalized IT virtualization 20 years ago and changed forever the way enterprise systems operate by making workloads more easily movable and controllable. Now the Palo Alto, California.-based giant – reports estimate that 95% of all IT departments have at least one VMware product – is moving into a new realm of AI-powered development of next-generation infrastructure.

To make the move, VMWare is partnering with Nvidia, the hottest IT processor maker on earth with 80% of the graphical processing unit (GPU) market. Nividia has been the most successful chipmaker to deploy AI in silicon, due mostly to its long history in making chips for gaming.

VMware revealed last week that its Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.4 platform is now generally available for enterprises, and it contains Nvidia’s own AI Enterprise Suite. This consists of pre-built sets of AI software, pre-trained models, and other tools that data scientists can use to create and deploy next-gen apps.

This is all to be deployed in a full-stack, hyper-converged infrastructure as a hybrid cloud platform, currently the most popular option in the world of cloud computing.

With this integration of platforms, VMware claims that VCF 4.4 brings improved AI and ML workload support and the capability to share virtual GPU’s — a relatively recent advancement — across multiple instances. AI Express