VMware’s 2019 acquistion of Bitfusion bears product.
Bitfusion Technology has been integrated into VMware vSphere 7. This will give organisations access to elastic infrastructure on-demand to support the increasing adoption of emerging technologies for growth in Southeast Asia’s digital future.
The recently added feature – VMware vSphere Bitfusion – was developed out of VMware’s 2019 acquisition of Bitfusion — previously a virtualisation startup.
The combination of Bitfusion and VMware vSphere will help organisations deliver cost savings, enable resource sharing out of the box and deliver the right hardware accelerator resource, like a GPU, to the right workload at the right time, said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware.
“Southeast Asia’s innovation ecosystem is powering the growth of the region’s digital economy, which is projected to reach US$300 billion by 20251,” he said. “To capitalise on this growth opportunity, businesses in the region are turning to technologies such as AI and ML to maximize operational efficiency and fast track business innovation.”
According to Prasad, organisations use hardware accelerators such as GPUs to dramatically improve the performance of AI/ML workloads that may run several hours or longer.
“IT teams have come to realise that these hardware accelerators are isolated islands—unable to be shared across many parts of the business,” he said. “The inability to share those resources leads to inefficient and poor utilisation of both existing and newly purchased resources.”
By breaking down existing silos of GPU resources, organisations will be able to achieve better utilisation and efficient use of them through sharing – resulting in immediate cost savings, notes Prasad.
“More importantly, organisations will be able to jump start new or stalled AI/ML initiatives to drive their business forward by sharing those GPU resources with their teams on-demand with VMware vSphere 7.”
VMware vSphere 7 with Bitfusion Enables Efficient GPU Pooling and Sharing AI and ML-based applications – deep learning training in particular – rely on hardware accelerators to tackle large and complex computation.
With the newly integrated Bitfusion capabilities, VMware vSphere 7 “will enable enterprises to pool their powerful GPU resources on their servers and share them within their data centres”, stated VMWare.
“That will enable organisations to share GPUs efficiently and rapidly across the network with teams of AI researchers, data scientists and ML developers relying on and/or building AI/ML applications,” it said.
