Paul Perez, Dell Technologies and Kit Colbert, VMware | Dell Technologies World 2020
Paul Perez, SVP & CTO, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies and Kit Colbert, VP & CTO, VMware Cloud, VMware sit down with Jeff Frick for Dell Technologies World Digital Experience 2020.
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Project Monterey’s SmartNIC solution offers modern architecture for applications and security
BY MARK ALBERTSON
VMware Inc.’s recent announcement of Project Monterey, a re-architecture of VMware Cloud Foundation from the hardware up to support modern applications, has opened the doors for a wide range of enterprise resources. Putting the equivalent of a data center on a chip will do that.
The key innovation behind Project Monterey involves VMware’s use of a SmartNIC, or network interface card, which can offload functions from the host.
“The hardware architecture itself needed to evolve and update to support all of the new requirements brought on by these modern apps,” said Kit Colbert (pictured, right), vice president and chief technology officer of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. “It’s a whole system, a whole server right there on that NIC. So, wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now. What this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture, and that’s why we’re really excited about it.”
Colbert spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. He was joined by Paul Perez (pictured, left), chief technology officer of the Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies Inc., and they discussed the additional functionality that Project Monterey provides, how the new solution can improve security, and the ability to integrate artificial intelligence into applications workloads. (* Disclosure below.)
Exposing remote devices
Colbert’s reference to cluster architecture is significant because it represents a new way to expose virtual devices and apps as though they were actual hardware.
“With Monterey and the SmartNIC technology, we can now dynamically expose remote devices from other hosts,” Colbert explained. “Things like network virtualization, storage virtualization, security functionality, we can move all of that onto the NIC. Once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some amazing things.”
One of those amazing things involves security. A common attack method used by today’s cybercriminals is to rewrite a computer’s master boot record. Evidence of this exploit can be found in some nation state attacks and malware that has been targeting systems during the global pandemic.
The collaboration between Dell and VMware offered an opportunity to improve security in the boot process, as validated recently in a whitepaper issued by the National Security Agency.
“In the case of Project Monterey, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model,” Perez said. “NSA recently published a whitepaper on best practices for secure boot, and they picked our implementation of secure boot as the reference standard.”
Another key area involves the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning in application workloads. VMware’s partnership with Nvidia Corp. in the development of the SmartNIC lay the groundwork for new advances in this space.
“Within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AI or machine learning service,” Perez said. “Nvidia has done an awesome job of targeting capability in AI and machine learning workloads, and what we realized is applications today depend on platform services. I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this.”
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
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