Benzinga | Oct 5, 2021 08:27AM EDT

NVIDIA Expands Early Access Program For VMware's Project Monterey To 'Enable Secure, Accelerated Data Centers'

NVIDIA today announced it is extending its collaboration with Lenovo to include participation in NVIDIA's early access program in support of Project Monterey, which is designed to modernize enterprise data centers with the security and performance of NVIDIA(r) BlueField(r) data processing units.

Announced by VMware with NVIDIA and ecosystem partners at VMworld 2020, Project Monterey aims to improve the performance, manageability and security of enterprise data centers through the latest networking technologies, including NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. Built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField DPUs enable delivery of applications at any scale by offloading, accelerating and isolating data center workloads.

NVIDIA, Lenovo and VMware are collaborating to evolve the architecture of the data center, cloud and edge to be software-defined and hardware-accelerated for tackling modern workloads, such as AI and machine learning. The early access program allows enterprises to tap into VMware-enabled preconfigured clusters accelerated by BlueField-powered servers, including Lenovo ThinkAgile VX and ThinkSystem Ready-Nodes.

"AI is transforming data centers, driving demand for new workloads and architectures," said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. "Lenovo's collaboration in our Project Monterey early access program is a key step in allowing enterprises to embrace AI's transformational benefits while tackling security and performance challenges."

"Lenovo and NVIDIA's collaboration on the Project Monterey early access program enables a fundamental solution shift towards advanced, DPU-powered data center architecture," said Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of Server, Storage and Software Defined Solutions at Lenovo ISG. "NVIDIA BlueField DPUs provide performance and security which enhance the modern data center that is software defined and hardware accelerated."

Organizations can register for NVIDIA's early access program at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/project-monterey/.