Red Hat has announced support for Red Hat OpenShift on Nvidia BlueField data processing units (DPUs), making it easier for organisations to deploy demanding AI application workloads with optimised security, networking and storage capabilities.
While modern business environments require increasingly secure and efficient ways to handle a growing volume of data, AI applications often compete with essential infrastructure services for resources. This can lead to potential performance bottlenecks and security risks. To address this challenge, Red Hat OpenShift on Nvidia BlueField offers a common, cloud-native platform that supports enhanced networking, streamlined provisioning and lifecycle management.
This approach creates isolation between the AI applications and infrastructure workloads, including networking and security services, that run on BlueField, offering additional benefits such as:
- Optimised resource utilisation: Red Hat OpenShift uses intelligent resource management to offload networking services from the CPU to the DPU, which frees up resources for AI application workloads, thereby optimising resource utilisation.
- Data plane and storage traffic acceleration: Red Hat OpenShift on BlueField helps speed up the data plane and storage traffic by offloading crypto and storage processing to the DPU, with support for NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) and an accelerated OVS data path, which enhances performance for demanding AI workloads.
- Advanced cloud networking: Red Hat OpenShift, with distributed routing capabilities powered by BlueField, helps improve secure multi-tenancy, network scalability, performance and traffic efficiency across clusters while streamlining network operations.
- Improved security posture: Red Hat OpenShift offloads infrastructure tasks to BlueField which helps reduce the attack surface for applications with a layered approach to security, effectively improving security posture.
Support for Nvidia BlueField on Red Hat OpenShift will be available as a technical preview in the coming weeks. Red Hat will continue to collaborate with Nvidia to integrate additional support capabilities for the Nvidia DOCA software framework and third party network functions for Nvidia BlueField on Red Hat OpenShift.
Looking ahead, Nvidia BlueField-4 will further extend these capabilities with next-generation acceleration, deeper DOCA integration, and enhanced performance to power the next wave of cloud-native AI factories. Red Hat is also working with Nvidia to support Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, enabling seamless, high-performance connectivity for AI workloads across distributed cloud environments.
Ryan King, vice-president: AI and infrastructure, partner ecosystem success at Red Hat, says: “As the adoption of generative and agentic AI grows, the demand for advanced security and performance in datacenters 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, says: “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.”