Author: Paul Turner, Vice President Product Management at VMware

Data Center infrastructure has been evolving into a distributed and heterogeneous platform comprising of new classes of devices like DPU, GPU and FPGAs, in addition to the CPU. Data Processing Units (DPUs – also known as SmartNICs), are particularly interesting as they not only can accelerate core infrastructure services, but also can form an alternate infrastructure backbone that can essentially be decoupled from the core computing infrastructure. This paradigm shift in the architecture for the Data Center aims to deliver higher workload consolidation, improved workload security and improved infrastructure performance.

This week, we witnessed a major shift in the landscape of our industry with AMD’s announcement to acquire Pensando Systems.

VMware has been partnering very closely with our industry leaders, including Pensando Systems, to deliver a single infrastructure platform across leading silicon and OEM vendors in the DPU space. With Project Monterey, we are helping our customers modernize their Data Centers. AMD’s announcement re-iterates our belief in the future of the Data Center as a distributed and heterogeneous architecture – which will continue to evolve by embracing newer types of devices and accelerators. VMware continues to see the critical role it needs to be play in bringing to reality the idea of seamless consumption of infrastructure services across multi-clouds by integrating disparate hardware solutions from industry leaders.

VMware and AMD have a history of forging strong engineering partnerships that have led to optimized versions of VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation running on world class hardware. VMware is also actively engaged with Pensando Systems to jointly deliver on the vision of a distributed data center architecture. AMD’s acquisition of Pensando Systems furthers our ability to have deeper and stronger engineering partnerships to bring a broader class of Data Center innovations to market.

We remain committed to creating a healthy ecosystem of solution providers – which ultimately leads to more choices for our mutual customers. We are thankful to our existing partners (NVIDIA, Pensando, Intel, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo) for their contributions to Project Monterey. We are thrilled for the future of the Data Center Infrastructure!

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