Early Access For Project Monterey
It’s finally here – Project Monterey early access program. They announced this project at VMworld 2020 and it’s a re-architecture of VMware Cloud Foundation leveraging hardware accelerators (SmartNICs) to offload and improve performance and security. VMware is working with vendors like Intel, NVIDIA and Pensando and also server OEMs like Dell, HPE and Lenovo.
Ragav Gopalan from the VMware vSphere Blog
As the next milestone, we are happy to announce the launch of Project Monterey Early Access program. The Early Access program is a unique opportunity for participating customers to collaborate with VMware to test and validate their use cases in a VMware lab environment to solve real customer pain points. As part of this program, customers and VMware together will set goals and expectations. The duration for the program is expected to last between 4-6 weeks on the average. A core support team comprised of subject matter experts and program managers will guide customers through their Early Access program journey.
The Project Monterey Early Access program will offer select customers the opportunity to help shape cutting edge data center technologies that will form the foundation for next generation of applications and workloads. Please reach out to your VMware sales team or representative to learn more about how you can participate in the Project Monterey Early Access program.
I see several benefits to taking part in this early access program:
If you have a greenfield deployment planned, this is a great way to consider SmartNICs for your new architecture. It’s also a way to confirm and validate that you have thought through different aspects of the new deployment. If you currently use any of the hardware partners that have been identified to support this new technology, you will go into production with confidence. This should give the IT management team a level of comfort before making any major purchases.
This is a good way to get the IT team familiar with the new technology and how it behaves. Your traditional way of looking at metrics and performance may change, so it’s nice to get a handle on that early. It’s also a good way to find out how your disaster and recovery plans will work with this new technology injected into your technology stack.
If you have a brownfield deployment or want to retrofit your current gear, this is a impressive way to validate if this technology can work for you. This is likely the deployment that will be most challenging, and it is good to have the team from VMware working alongside you.
I know if mentioned it in the greenfield deployment option, but don’t forget to always consider your disaster recovery site. I know this can sometimes get overlooked, but it’s important to factor into the costing and design.
Will you be joining the Project Monterey Early Access program? Would you consider this for a greenfield or brownfield environment? Please let me know on Twitter, and thanks for reading.