Red Hat adds support for OpenShift on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs
Author: Joe Peck
Red Hat, a US provider of open-source software, has announced support for running Red Hat OpenShift on NVIDIA BlueField data processing units (DPUs).
The company says the development is intended to help organisations deploy AI workloads with improved security, networking, and storage performance.
According to Red Hat, modern AI applications increasingly compete with core infrastructure services for system resources, which can affect performance and security.
The company states that running OpenShift with BlueField aims to separate AI workloads from infrastructure functions, such as networking and security, to improve operational efficiency and reduce system contention.
It says the platform will support enhanced networking, more streamlined lifecycle management, and resource offloading to the DPU.
Workload isolation and resource efficiency
Red Hat states that by shifting networking services and infrastructure management tasks to the DPU, CPU resources can be used for AI applications, also highlighting acceleration features for data-plane and storage-traffic processing, including support for NVMe over Fabrics and optimised Open vSwitch data paths.
Additional features include distributed routing for multi-tenant environments and security controls designed to reduce attack surfaces by isolating workloads away from infrastructure services.
Support for BlueField on OpenShift will be offered initially as a technical preview, with broader integration planned. Red Hat notes that ongoing work with NVIDIA aims to add further support for the NVIDIA DOCA software framework and third-party network functions.
The companies also expect future capability enhancements with the next generation of BlueField hardware and integration with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking for distributed AI environments.
Ryan King, Vice President, AI and Infrastructure, Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, comments, “As the adoption of generative and agentic AI grows, the demand for advanced security and performance in data centres has never been higher, particularly with the proliferation of AI workloads.
“Our collaboration with NVIDIA to enable Red Hat OpenShift support for NVIDIA BlueField DPUs provides customers with a more reliable, secure, and high-performance platform to address this challenge and maximise their hardware investment.”
Justin Boitano, Vice President, Enterprise Products at NVIDIA, adds, “Data-intensive AI reasoning workloads demand a new era of secure and efficient infrastructure.
“The Red Hat OpenShift integration of NVIDIA BlueField builds on our longstanding work to empower organisations to achieve unprecedented scale and performance across their AI infrastructure.”
For more from Red Hat, click here.
