Enterprises can now enroll in VMware's Project Monterey program

Cloud symbol overlaying an image of servers in a data center.
(Image credit: Pixabay)

As AI and machine learning are putting tremendous pressure on traditional IT workloads, VMware, Nvidia and Dell Technologies are collaborating on a new initiative called Project Monterey.

Enterprises that want to work with these emerging technologies without putting additional strain on their servers and infrastructure can now register to participate in this project as part of an early access program to dramatically improve the performance, manageability and security of their environments.

Through their collaboration, VMware, Dell Technologies and Nvidia aim to evolve the architecture of the data center, cloud and edge to one that is both software-defined and hardware-accelerated to address changing application requirements.

Project Monterey

AI and other compute-intensive workloads require real-time data streaming analysis which puts a heavy load on server CPUs. As a result of this additional load, the percentage of processing power required to run tasks that aren't an integral part of application workloads has also increased leading to a reduction in data center efficiency.

Project Monterey aims to address this by leading the shift to advanced hybrid cloud data center architectures that benefit from hypervisor and accelerated software-defined networking, security and storage.

By registering for early access to Project Monterey to use its preconfigured clusters, enterprises will be able to explore the evolution of VMware Cloud Foundation while taking advantage of the disruptive hardware capabilities of the Dell EMC Power Edge R750 server equipped with a Nvidia Blue-Field 2 data processing unit (DPU) according to a new blog post from Nvidia.

A number of functions that previously ran on the core CPU are offloaded, isolated and accelerated on the DPU to support new possibilities such as improved performance for application and infrastructure services, enhanced visibility, application security and observability, offloaded firewall capabilities and improved data center efficiency and cost for enterprise, edge and cloud.

Interested organizations can register here to get started with Project Monterey and we'll likely hear more from VMware, Dell Technologies and Nvidia once the initiative exits early access.

Anthony Spadafora

After working with the TechRadar Pro team for the last several years, Anthony is now the security and networking editor at Tom’s Guide where he covers everything from data breaches and ransomware gangs to the best way to cover your whole home or business with Wi-Fi. When not writing, you can find him tinkering with PCs and game consoles, managing cables and upgrading his smart home.