Cloud infrastructure company
VMware has announced plans to acquire virtualization software provider Bitfusion. Palo Alto, California-based VMware is one of the leaders in the cloud arena. Established in 1998, the company’s services include hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, and data center services. It is also a major provider of virtualization services. The acquisition will allow VMware’s customers to better leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) both on-premises and in hybrid clouds.
Bitfusion was established in 2015 and is still a startup operation. The company offers an “elastic AI infrastructure for multi-cloud” purposes with a Graphic Processor Units (GPU) focus - an industry first. With headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, United States, its services include deep learning solutions, AI development, docker containers, machine learning, and ‘Big Data’ solutions. While hardware accelerators are generally deployed using bare-metal services, Bitfusion’s services virtualize hardware accelerators to optimize costs and make resources sharing faster. The acquisition will allow VMware to leverage virtualized hardware accelerators to support AI workloads. Financial aspects of the acquisition have not been released.
“Bitfusion offers a software platform that decouples specific physical resources from the servers they are attached to in the environment,” explained Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware, on the company’s blog. “For example, the platform can share GPUs in a virtualized infrastructure, as a pool of network-accessible resources, rather than isolated resources per server. Additionally, the platform can be extended to support other accelerators like FPGAs and ASICs. In many ways, Bitfusion offers for hardware acceleration what VMware offered to the compute landscape several years ago. Bitfusion also aligns well with VMware’s ‘Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device’ vision with its ability to work across AI frameworks, clouds, networks, and formats such as virtual machines and containers”.
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