VMware unveiled Project Monterey at VMworld 2020 event. Project Monterey is a technology preview focused on evolving its architecture for the data center, cloud, and edge to address the changing requirements of next-generation applications including AI, machine learning, and 5G applications.
Next-generation applications
VMware also announced a collaboration with partners to deliver solutions based on Project Monterey including Intel, NVIDIA, and Pensando Systems and system companies Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo. Project Monterey aims to help organizations address the increasingly complex application landscape. The initiative will span:
- Support for SmartNICs: VMware is evolving VMware Cloud Foundation (VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN and VMware NSX) to support SmartNIC technology (also referred to as data processing units or DPUs), a new architectural component that offloads processing tasks that the server CPU would normally handle.
- Platform Re-architecture: VMware will rearchitect VMware Cloud Foundation to enable disaggregation of the server including extending support for bare metal servers. This will enable an application running on one physical server to consume hardware accelerator resources such as FPGAs from other physical servers. This will also enable physical resources to be dynamically accessed based on policy or via software API, tailored to the needs of the application.
- Security: With Project Monterey, VMware can further deliver on its vision for intrinsic security. Each SmartNIC is capable of running a fully-featured stateful firewall and advanced security suite. Since this will run in the NIC and not in the host, up to thousands of tiny firewalls will be able to be deployed and automatically tuned to protect specific application services that make up the application, wrapping each service with intelligent defenses that can shield any vulnerability of that specific service.