#177 - SmartNICs and Project Monterey

This week Chris and Martin look at SmartNIC technology and the announcement of Project Monterey. SmartNICs are offload devices that provide networking, storage and security functions with additional benefits such as centralised management. VMware has announced Project Monterey, a preview solution that takes SmartNICs and offloads storage and networking tasks from the ESXi hypervisor.

It’s clear from the discussion that SmartNIC technology needs to provide a “10x” benefit to the data centre. The technology is already in use by hyperscalers to deliver Public Cloud. With Monterey and ESXi 7, the private data centre can use a similar centralised management approach. How will this work with existing infrastructure? VMware has ported ESXi to ARM and intends to run services on ESXi on the SmartNIC card. There are so many questions this raises, so join us for a fascinating discussion on this technology.

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Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:01:30 – Project Monterey – not the IBM AIX port…
00:03:00 – What is a SmartNIC?
00:04:05 – Are SmartNICs new or reinvention of existing technology? 00:04:40 – Mainframes did offload first
00:08:00 – Division of responsibilities – team wars?
00:11:00 – What benefits do SmartNICs bring?
00:14:25 – Digging deeper into Project Monterey
00:15:31 – Why put ESXi on ARM?
00:18:00 – How will hot pluggable work?
00:22:00 – Here’s where Project Monterey could be useful
00:24:00 – Could SmartNICs aid the adoption of Arm for primary workloads?
00:27:40 – Could Composable see a big benefit from SmartNICs?
00:30:00 – Return of the mainframe?
00:31:55 – On reflection, are SmartNICs worthwhile?
00:35:00 – Wrap Up

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