VMware has announced Project Monterey—a technology preview focused on evolving its architecture for the data center, cloud and edge. The initiative is aimed at addressing the changing requirements of next-gen applications including AI, machine learning and 5G applications.

VMware is also collaborating with ecosystem partners to deliver solutions based on Project Monterey. These include Intel, NVIDIA and Pensando Systems and system companies Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo.

Project Monterey will extend VMware infrastructure and operations for all applications—reducing the need for specialized systems, teams and management tools—which in turn will be able to reduce overall complexity and TCO.

The initiative will span support for SmartNICs. VMware is evolving VMware Cloud Foundation 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.

By supporting SmartNICs, VMware Cloud Foundation will be able to maintain compute virtualization on the server CPU while offloading networking and storage I/O functions to the SmartNIC CPU. This will allow applications to maximize the use of the available network bandwidth while saving server CPU cycles for top application performance.

VMware said it has taken the first step of this evolution by enabling VMware ESXi to run on SmartNICs.

Also, VMware will rearchitect VMware Cloud Foundation to enable disaggregation of the server including extending support for bare metal servers.