NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a comprehensive software suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks optimized, certified and supported by NVIDIA, exclusively with VMware vSphere 7 Update 2, separately announced today.
Through a first-of-its-kind industry collaboration to develop an AI-Ready Enterprise platform, NVIDIA teamed with VMware to virtualize AI workloads on VMware vSphere with NVIDIA AI Enterprise. The offering gives enterprises the software required to develop a broad range of AI solutions, such as advanced diagnostics in healthcare, smart factories for manufacturing, and fraud detection in financial services.
With the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, IT professionals at the hundreds of thousands of enterprises that use vSphere for compute virtualization can now support AI with the same tools they use to manage large-scale data centers and hybrid cloud environments. The NVIDIA software suite provides scale-out, multi-node, AI application performance on vSphere that is indistinguishable from bare-metal servers.
“Until now, the world has run AI on bare-metal servers,” said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA AI Enterprise enables customers to reduce AI model development time from 80 weeks to just eight weeks, and allows them to deploy and manage advanced AI applications on VMware vSphere with the same scale-out, record-breaking NVIDIA accelerated computing performance that’s possible on bare metal.”
“Every enterprise is exploring how to modernize their infrastructure to meet the demands of AI applications,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. “With NVIDIA AI Enterprise and vSphere 7 Update 2, VMware customers are now able to fast-track AI in their virtualized data centers and easily deploy certified, AI-ready infrastructure for their modern apps.”
Powering Advanced AI at Enterprise Scale
Among the first to use NVIDIA AI Enterprise for vSphere is Optum Technology, part of UnitedHealth Group.
“AI plays an increasingly important role in the data-driven services Optum provides for United Healthcare,” said Justin Potuznik, senior principal engineer at Optum Technology. “With NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise software and infrastructure running on our VMware vSphere environment, we’ll be able to power our modern application workloads and efficiently deploy AI at enterprise scale.”
Flexible AI Infrastructure for the Hybrid Cloud
NVIDIA AI Enterprise provides compatibility for a broad set of accelerated CUDA applications, AI frameworks, pre-trained models and software development kits running in the hybrid cloud. Optimizations enable workloads to scale across multiple nodes to support large deep learning training models with full GPU virtualization.
To power the applications in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 is now certified for NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs on NVIDIA-Certified Systems, which include high-volume servers from Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro. With this certification comes direct customer support from NVIDIA for vSphere customers that acquire a license for NVIDIA AI Enterprise.
NVIDIA has also certified vSphere as the only compute virtualization software to provide hypervisor support for live migration with NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU technology, which allows each A100 GPU to be partitioned into up to seven instances at the hardware level to maximize efficiency for workloads of all sizes.
Additionally, select NVIDIA ConnectX adapters are now certified for VMware vSAN over RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), which offloads CPU communication tasks to boost application performance and improve infrastructure returns on investment.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise is available as a perpetual license at $3,595 per CPU socket. Enterprise Business Standard Support for NVIDIA AI Enterprise is $899 annually per license. Customers can apply for early access to NVIDIA AI Enterprise as they plan their upgrades to VMware vSphere 7 Update 2.
For more information on bringing AI to VMware hybrid clouds, read the NVIDIA blog and the VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 release blog. Free registration is now open for GTC 2021, where NVIDIA and VMware will present on bringing AI to every enterprise.
