Broadcom Inc. today unveiled the latest updates to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the company's flagship private cloud platform. The latest advancements in VCF support customers' digital innovation with faster infrastructure modernization, improved developer productivity, and better cyber resiliency and security with low total cost of ownership.

"VMware Cloud Foundation is the industry's first private-cloud platform to offer the combined power of public and private clouds with unmatched operational simplicity and proven total cost of ownership value," said Paul Turner, Vice President of Products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom. "With our latest release, VCF is delivering on key requirements driven by customer input. The new VCF Import functionality will be a game changer in accelerating VCF adoption and improving time to value. We are also delivering a set of new capabilities that helps IT more quickly meet the needs of developers without increasing business risk. This latest release of VCF puts us squarely on the path to delivering on the full promise of VCF for our customers."

It's official: NVIDIA delivered the world's fastest platform in industry-standard tests for inference on generative AI. In the latest MLPerf benchmarks, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM—software that speeds and simplifies the complex job of inference on large language models—boosted the performance of NVIDIA Hopper architecture GPUs on the GPT-J LLM nearly 3x over their results just six months ago. The dramatic speedup demonstrates the power of NVIDIA's full-stack platform of chips, systems and software to handle the demanding requirements of running generative AI. Leading companies are using TensorRT-LLM to optimize their models. And NVIDIA NIM—a set of inference microservices that includes inferencing engines like TensorRT-LLM—makes it easier than ever for businesses to deploy NVIDIA's inference platform.

Raising the Bar in Generative AI
TensorRT-LLM running on NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs—the latest, memory-enhanced Hopper GPUs—delivered the fastest performance running inference in MLPerf's biggest test of generative AI to date. The new benchmark uses the largest version of Llama 2, a state-of-the-art large language model packing 70 billion parameters. The model is more than 10x larger than the GPT-J LLM first used in the September benchmarks. The memory-enhanced H200 GPUs, in their MLPerf debut, used TensorRT-LLM to produce up to 31,000 tokens/second, a record on MLPerf's Llama 2 benchmark. The H200 GPU results include up to 14% gains from a custom thermal solution. It's one example of innovations beyond standard air cooling that systems builders are applying to their NVIDIA MGX designs to take the performance of Hopper GPUs to new heights.

ZOTAC Technology Limited, a global leader in innovative technology solutions, expands its product portfolio with the GPU Server Series. The first series of products in ZOTAC's Enterprise lineup offers organizations affordable and high-performance computing solutions for a wide range of demanding applications, from core-to-edge inferencing and data visualization to model training, HPC modeling, and simulation.

The ZOTAC series of GPU Servers comes in a diverse range of form factors and configurations, featuring both Tower Workstations and Rack Mount Servers, as well as both Intel and AMD processor configurations. With support for up to 10 GPUs, modular design for easier access to internal hardware, a high space-to-performance ratio, and industry-standard features like redundant power supplies and extensive cooling options, ZOTAC's enterprise solutions can ensure optimal performance and durability, even under sustained intense workloads.

Cyberattacks are an existential risk, with 89% of organizations ranking ransomware as one of the top five threats to their viability, according to a November 2023 report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading analyst firm. And this is just one of many risks to corporate data—insider threats, data exfiltration, hardware failures, and natural disasters also pose significant danger. Moreover, as the just-released 2024 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index states, as the generative AI market becomes more established, it could trigger the maturity of AI as an attack surface, mobilizing even further investment in new tools from cybercriminals. The report notes that enterprises should also recognize that their existing underlying infrastructure is a gateway to their AI models that doesn't require novel tactics from attackers to target.

To help clients counter these threats with earlier and more accurate detection, we're announcing new AI-enhanced versions of the IBM FlashCore Module technology available inside new IBM Storage FlashSystem products and a new version of IBM Storage Defender software to help organizations improve their ability to detect and respond to ransomware and other cyberattacks that threaten their data. The newly available fourth generation of FlashCore Module (FCM) technology enables artificial intelligence capabilities within the IBM Storage FlashSystem family. FCM works with Storage Defender to provide end-to-end data resilience across primary and secondary workloads with AI-powered sensors designed for earlier notification of cyber threats to help enterprises recover faster.

Broadcom is thrilled to announce Broadcom's successful acquisition of VMware, and the start of a new and exciting era for all of us at the company. VMware joins our engineering-first, innovation-centric team, which is another important step forward in building the world's leading infrastructure technology company.

While an important moment for Broadcom, it's also an exciting milestone for our customers around the world. And as I said when we first announced the acquisition, we can now come together and have the scale to help global enterprises address their complex IT infrastructure challenges by enabling private and hybrid cloud environments and helping them deploy an "apps anywhere" strategy. Our goal is to help customers optimize their private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing them to run applications and services anywhere.

Lenovo and NVIDIA today announced an expansion of their partnership with new, hybrid solutions and engineering collaboration that supports their shared vision to bring the power of generative AI to every enterprise. In close collaboration with NVIDIA, Lenovo will deliver fully integrated systems that bring AI-powered computing to everywhere data is created, from the edge to the cloud, helping businesses easily deploy tailored generative AI applications to drive innovation and transformation across any industry.

The offerings were described by Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the annual global Lenovo Tech World keynote held in Austin, Texas, where they discussed businesses' need for end-to-end solutions that bring together accelerated systems, AI software and expert services to quickly build and run custom AI models using their own data. Supported by the new Lenovo AI Professional Services Practice, the solutions enable enterprises to use a hybrid cloud approach - building their custom AI models using NVIDIA AI Foundations cloud service and then running them with on-prem Lenovo systems powered by NVIDIA's latest hardware and software designed for generative AI.

NVIDIA's latest financial report for FY2Q24 reveals that its data center business reached US$10.32 billion—a QoQ growth of 141% and YoY increase of 171%. The company remains optimistic about its future growth. TrendForce believes that the primary driver behind NVIDIA's robust revenue growth stems from its data center's AI server-related solutions. Key products include AI-accelerated GPUs and AI server HGX reference architecture, which serve as the foundational AI infrastructure for large data centers.

TrendForce further anticipates that NVIDIA will integrate its software and hardware resources. Utilizing a refined approach, NVIDIA will align its high-end, mid-tier, and entry-level GPU AI accelerator chips with various ODMs and OEMs, establishing a collaborative system certification model. Beyond accelerating the deployment of CSP cloud AI server infrastructures, NVIDIA is also partnering with entities like VMware on solutions including the Private AI Foundation. This strategy extends NVIDIA's reach into the edge enterprise AI server market, underpinning steady growth in its data center business for the next two years.

NVIDIA today announced the world's leading system manufacturers will deliver AI-ready servers that support VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, announced separately today, to help companies customize and deploy generative AI applications using their proprietary business data. NVIDIA AI-ready servers will include NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPUs and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to enable enterprises to fine-tune generative AI foundation models and deploy generative AI applications like intelligent chatbots, search and summarization tools. These servers also provide NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure and software to power VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

NVIDIA L40S-powered servers from leading global system manufacturers - Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo . will be available by year-end to accelerate enterprise AI. "A new computing era has begun," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Companies in every industry are racing to adopt generative AI. With our ecosystem of world-leading software and system partners, we are bringing generative AI to the world's enterprises."

Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, today announced a new VMware vSAN solution optimized to run enterprise class hyperconverged virtualized workloads. As virtualized workloads become more advanced, processing power and storage performance requirements increase, requiring greater capacity to meet application SLAs and maximize virtual machine density. This solution also utilizes the latest Intel AMX accelerator for AI workloads.

When compared to the Supermicro X11 BigTwin, benchmark testing conducted by Supermicro showed up to 4.7X higher IO throughput and 8.2X lower latency on the HCIBench benchmark, up to 4.9X faster image classification inference throughput on the ResNet50 model and up to 4X faster natural language processing throughput on BERT-Large model. In addition, the superior power and efficiency of the Supermicro X13 BigTwin architecture can deliver up to 3X cost and performance improvement within the same node footprint compared to a similar deployment based on older generation Supermicro systems, creating a compelling case for organizations to upgrade their aging infrastructure.

Today, at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, AMD continued to showcase its proven performance and growing adoption of AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Pensando data processing units (DPUs) and adaptive computing products as ideal solutions for the most efficient and innovative virtualized environments. For instance, a system powered by a 4th Gen AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs and a Pensando DPU, delivers approximately 3.3x the Redis application performance and 1.75x the aggregate network throughput when compared to a 4th Gen EPYC system with standard NICs. Additionally, servers with 2P 4th Gen EPYC 9654 CPUs alone can enable using up to 35% fewer servers in an environment running 2000 virtual machines (VMs) compared to 2P Intel Xeon 8490H based servers.

"AMD is helping enterprise customers fully realize the benefits of their virtualized data centers with the latest generation EPYC CPUs and Pensando DPUs," said Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Business Group, AMD. "Consolidation and modernization enable businesses to increase server utilization and efficiency while delivering impressive performance for critical enterprise workloads. Our ongoing collaboration with VMware enables customers to get more efficient and agile to reach their digital transformation goals."

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO), a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, today affirmed its expectation that its acquisition of VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) will close on October 30, 2023, and provided an update on its progress with various regulatory agencies.

On August 21, 2023, Broadcom received final transaction approval from the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority. This follows legal merger clearance in the European Union, as well as in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and Taiwan, and foreign investment control clearance in all necessary jurisdictions. In the U.S., the Hart-Scott-Rodino pre-merger waiting periods have expired, and there is no legal impediment to closing under U.S. merger regulations.

NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA AI Workbench, a unified, easy-to-use toolkit that allows developers to quickly create, test and customize pretrained generative AI models on a PC or workstation - then scale them to virtually any data center, public cloud or NVIDIA DGX Cloud. AI Workbench removes the complexity of getting started with an enterprise AI project. Accessed through a simplified interface running on a local system, it allows developers to customize models from popular repositories like Hugging Face, GitHub and NVIDIA NGC using custom data. The models can then be shared easily across multiple platforms.

"Enterprises around the world are racing to find the right infrastructure and build generative AI models and applications," said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA AI Workbench provides a simplified path for cross-organizational teams to create the AI-based applications that are increasingly becoming essential in modern business."

The European Commission has today announced that it has granted conditional approval—under EU Merger Regulation—for the $61 billion acquisition of VMware by Broadcom: "The approval is conditional upon full compliance with the commitments offered by Broadcom. Today's decision follows an in-depth investigation of the proposed acquisition. Broadcom is a hardware company that offers, among other products, Fibre Channel Host-Bus Adapters ('FC HBAs'), storage adapters and Network Interface Cards ('NICs'), which are hardware components that connect servers to storage or network. Broadcom has recently started expanding into software markets, mainly for security and mainframe applications. VMware is a software supplier offering mainly virtualization software that interoperates with a wide range of hardware, including FC HBAs, storage adapters and NICs.

A company spokesperson commented on the EU administration's conditional approval of the deal: "Broadcom provided the European Commission with a technology access remedy that preserves interoperability, a core principle that would not have changed as a result of this transaction...Broadcom did this to fully address the concerns expressed by the European Commission, and Broadcom welcomes the Commission's decision to accept this access remedy." The aforementioned "concerns" relate to the acquisition resulting in a possible restriction of "competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software." Broadcom is aiming to finalize their purchase of VMware by November 1, but they have to contend with forthcoming judgements from US and UK regulators prior to that date.

NVIDIA and VMware are helping professionals elevate extended reality (XR) by streaming from the cloud with Workspace ONE XR Hub, which includes an integration of NVIDIA CloudXR. Now available, Workspace ONE XR Hub enhances the user experience for VR headsets through advanced authentication and customization options. Combined with the cutting-edge streaming capabilities of CloudXR, Workspace ONE XR Hub enables more professionals, design teams and developers to quickly and securely access complex immersive environments using all-in-one headsets.

Many organizations across industries use XR technologies to boost productivity and enhance creativity. However, teams often come across challenges when it comes to integrating XR into their workflows. That's why NVIDIA and VMware are working together to make it easier for enterprises to adopt augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Whether it's running immersive training sessions or conducting virtual design reviews, professionals can achieve the highest fidelity experience with greater mobility through Workspace ONE XR Hub and CloudXR.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking and storage solution innovator, today unveiled the 2U short-depth TS-855eU NAS Series, including the TS-855eU with single PSU and the TS-855eU-RP with redundant power supplies. The short-depth rackmount TS-855eU NAS series is exceptionally suitable for IT deployment in small cabinet, spacious business workplaces, or production lines. Powered by an Intel Atom C5125 8-core 2.8 GHz processor with Intel QuickAssist Technology and supporting up to 64 GB memory (ECC memory supported), the sturdy and feature-rich TS-855eU series provides eight SATA drive bays, dual-port 2.5GbE. With these features and more, the TS-855eU series fulfills the performance and capacity requirements of business file servers, virtual machines, SaaS backups, and virtualization applications.

"With a 38% reduction in size, the 2U rackmount TS-855eU NAS series is only 11.7 inches (297.4 mm) deep, making it suitable for installation in small cabinets and IT rooms with strict cabling and ventilation requirements," said Andy Chuang, Product Manager of QNAP. "It fits in constrained environments while supporting reliable daily operations with its excellent performance and well-rounded business-ready features."

Today, Intel announced that the LF AI & Data Foundation Technical Advisory Council accepted Open Federated Learning (OpenFL) as an incubation project to further drive collaboration, standardization and interoperability. OpenFL is an open source framework for a type of distributed AI referred to as federated learning (FL) that incorporates privacy-preserving features called confidential computing. It was developed and hosted by Intel to help data scientists address the challenge of maintaining data privacy while bringing together insights from many disparate, confidential or regulated data sets.

"We are thrilled to welcome OpenFL to the LF AI & Data Foundation. This project's innovative approach to enabling organizations to collaboratively train machine learning models across multiple devices or data centers without the need to share raw data aligns perfectly with our mission to accelerate the growth and adoption of open source AI and data technologies. We look forward to collaborating with the talented individuals behind this project and helping to drive its success," said Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, executive director, LF AI & Data Foundation.

Synology today announced the addition of RackStation RS2423+ and RS2423RP+ to the versatile and cost-effective Plus series systems. The 2U 12-bay RS2423(RP)+ are ideal data management and backup solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as branch offices. "With strong performance out of the box and flexible configuration and expansion options, these servers are the perfect on-prem storage solution for growing businesses," said Peggy Weng, Product Manager at Synology.

Offering a performance increase over its predecessor with sequential read/write speeds of over 3,500/1,700 MB/s, the RS2423(RP)+ packs a punch. This device features built-in 10GbE connectivity along with 2 x 1GbE ports with support for additional 10/25GbE networking. The 12-bays of RS2423(RP)+ support up to 216 TB of total storage capacity and can be expanded to 24 bays with a RX1223RP Expansion Unit for up to 432 TB of storage.

For more than a decade, Intel and its partners have been on a mission to virtualize the world's networks, from the core to the RAN (radio access network) and out to the edge, moving them from fixed-function hardware onto programmable, software-defined platforms, making networks more agile while driving down their complexity and cost.

Now operators are looking to cross the next chasm in delivering cloud-native functionality for automating, managing and responding to an increasingly diverse mix of data and services, providing organizations with the intelligence needed at the edge of their operations. Today, Intel announced a range of products and solutions driving this transition and broad industry support from leading operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Synology today announced the availability of the 12-bay SA6400, its most versatile general-purpose storage system designed to provide enterprises and large studios with lightning-fast data transfer speeds and on-demand capacity expansion. "SA6400 is the ideal solution to tackle today's ever-increasing amounts of unstructured data," said Julien Chen, Product Manager at Synology. "Its ability to quickly scale as data demands grow makes it suitable to serve as file or backup storage in agile and dynamic environments, getting businesses ready for future data growth."

Storage capacity is seamlessly expandable by adding up to 8 RX1223RP expansion units for a total of 108 drive bays, making room for over 1.9 petabytes on a single system—9 times the original capacity. With a throughput of over 6,500/4,000 MB/s sequential read/write, SA6400 ensures smooth operations even in the most demanding scenarios, including enterprise data centers, large production studios, and applications in the retail or hospitality sectors. Performance can be further boosted to accommodate more streams or tackle specialized applications by upgrading the built-in 10 GbE networking to 25 or even 40 GbE.

Synology today announced the new 4-bay Synology DiskStation DS923+, the latest in its Plus line of all-in-one storage devices for home office and small business users. Powered by the versatile Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system, the DS923+ delivers comprehensive solutions to protect and manage business data, easily collaborate on documents, access files remotely, and monitor physical assets, all within a compact desktop format. It offers consistent performance out of the box, with the option to easily upgrade networking and further boost data transfer speeds through network cards.

"The DS923+ provides users with impressive performance and capability for its size," said Michael Wang, Product Manager at Synology. "With the ability to easily scale the storage and networking, it adapts as your needs grow."

ASUS, a leading provider of server systems, server motherboards and workstations, today announced new best-in-class server solutions powered by the latest AMD EPYC 9004 Series processors. ASUS also launched superior liquid-cooling solutions that dramatically improve the data-center power-usage effectiveness (PUE).

The breakthrough thermal design in this new generation delivers superior power and thermal capabilities to support class-leading features, including up to 400-watt CPUs, up to 350-watt GPUs, and 400 Gbps networking. All ASUS liquid-cooling solutions will be demonstrated in the ASUS booth (number 3816) at SC22 from November 14-17, 2022, at Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, introduced today the high-performance TVS-hx74 QuTS hero NAS series, including the 4-bay TVS-h474, 6-bay, TVS-h674 and 8-bay TVS-h874 models that incorporate 12th Gen Intel Core multi-core/multi-thread processors. The TVS-hx74 running ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system ensures data integrity and supports block-level inline data deduplication and compression, near-limitless snapshots, and real-time SnapSync. Featuring PCIe Gen 4 (up to twice the transmission speed of Gen 3) expandability, M.2 NVMe SSD caching, and 2.5 GbE connectivity, the TVS-hx74 tackles demanding business challenges in storage, backup, virtualization, and application servers.

"QNAP's TVS-hx74 is the ideal entry-level ZFS NAS for SMBs," said Meiji Chang, General Manager of QNAP, adding "The multi-core processors and versatile expandability also fulfill multi-tasking demands in enterprise IT environments and provide abundant computing resources for virtualization applications." "We are excited to see QNAP employ Intel's cutting-edge solution within their latest NAS series. The 12th Gen Intel Core multi-core/multi-thread processors will deliver excellent computing performance for accelerating SMB virtualization applications and graphical demands," said Jason Ziller, General Manager, Client Connectivity Division at Intel Corporation.

The demand for data is insatiable, from 5G to the cloud to smart cities. As a society we want more autonomy, information to fuel our decisions and habits, and connection - to people, stories, and experiences.

To address these demands, the cloud infrastructure of tomorrow will need to handle the coming data explosion and the effective processing of evermore complex workloads … all while increasing power efficiency and minimizing carbon footprint. It's why the industry is increasingly looking to the performance, power efficiency, specialized processing and workload acceleration enabled by Arm Neoverse to redefine and transform the world's computing infrastructure.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading computing, networking, and storage solution innovator, today launched reliable QuTS hero NAS TS-hx87XU-RP series, available in 9, 18, 22, and 30-bay models. The series integrates the power of Intel Xeon E-2300 series processors with fast 10GbE and 2.5GbE Multi-Gig connectivity and an efficient HDD/SSD hybrid storage architecture that balances performance, capacity, and cost. Running the ZFS-based QuTS hero operating system, the TS-hx87XU-RP series prioritizes data integrity and provides powerful data reduction, near-limitless snapshots, up to 5 petabytes capacity per shared folder, and more, serving as ideal storage solution that meets today's business requirements for file servers, virtualization servers, VDI, and backup/restore.

Designed for heavy business workloads, the TS-hx87XU-RP has extreme computing power from the Intel Xeon E processor, along with up to 128 GB DDR4 ECC memory to fuel multitasking demands and redundant power supply protection. In-built 10GBASE-T and 2.5 GbE network ports fulfill bandwidth-demanding tasks such as virtualization, large file transfers, and real-time applications. High-speed PCIe Gen 4 slots are included for extending core NAS functionality, such as adding additional 10/25 GbE network interface cards, QM2 cards to add M.2 SSDs and 2.5 GbE/10GbE ports, Fibre Channel cards for SAN storage, and storage expansion cards to connect QNAP expansion enclosures. The TS-hx87XU-RP series can pair with QNAP's managed and unmanaged 10GbE/2.5 GbE switches, assisting organizations in implementing high-speed, secure and scalable network environments without going over budget.

NVIDIA today announced a new data center solution with Dell Technologies designed for the era of AI, bringing state-of-the-art AI training, AI inference, data processing, data science and zero-trust security capabilities to enterprises worldwide. The solution combines Dell PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, and is optimized for VMware vSphere 8 enterprise workload platform, also announced today.

"AI and zero-trust security are powerful forces driving the world's enterprises to rearchitect their data centers as computing and networking workloads are skyrocketing," said Manuvir Das, head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. "VMware vSphere 8 offloads, accelerates, isolates and better secures data center infrastructure services onto the NVIDIA BlueField DPU, and frees the computing resources to process the intelligence factories of the world's enterprises."