What is a SmartNIC? Mellanox at VMworld 2019

Kevin Deierling with Mellanox discusses SmartNICs and their recent announcements from the floor of VMworld 2019. Smart means the NIC can offload the data path in very flexible ways. Because networking changes frequently...and the way security works, we have a flexible pipeline that you can program. And so things like Geneve that they never invented and OVS. We can do all of that in the NIC and we don't burden the CPU. So we offload the CPU and it's very flexible. So we can have really put a computer in front of the computer.