VMware announced new updates on Monday that will assist customers to modernize their applications and digital infrastructure. The updates are vSphere 7 and vSAN 7, and they will allow businesses’ information technology (IT) teams to support old and new applications with infrastructure that is developer and AI-ready. The updates will also increase data security and simplify business operations. 

“VMware is helping vSphere admins expand their influence beyond traditional virtualized applications to new enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) environments. These new capabilities allow infrastructure to meet the rapid pace of application change seamlessly,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing at VMware.

The updates will reduce the cost and complexity of traditional storage and guide VMware’s 30,000 customers along the path to efficient and straightforward hybrid cloud use. vSphere 7 will address a set of customer issues, especially ones involving old software resource inefficiency. 

NVIDIA has exclusively certified VMware’s new updates, and they will be released for NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise suite, a cloud-native collection of optimized AI applications and frameworks, for an end-to-end AI solution. 

“NVIDIA AI Enterprise is a software suite optimized, certified and supported on VMware vSphere that enables customers to rapidly deploy, manage and scale AI in production with confidence,” said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of enterprise and edge computing at NVIDIA. 

The vSphere 7 update will support NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in NVIDIA-Certified Systems. The NVIDIA AI Enterprise with vSphere 7 will enable customers to use end-to-end AI solutions with confidence on their existing enterprise virtualization platform, rather than running AI projects in separate unmanageable IT systems.

The updates will also deal with broad cybersecurity measures for applications, including confidential containers for vSphere Pods on AMD EPYC processor-based servers using secure encrypted virtualization-encrypted state (SEV-ES). The update also contains native key provider features, which will deliver primary key management server (KMS) capabilities permitting customers to enable encryption and advanced security features out of the box. 

“Through NVIDIA’s collaboration with VMware, IT professionals can now support business teams with the industry’s most trusted AI tools across their hybrid cloud infrastructure,” concluded Boitano. 

The White House announced that it will make a $250 million investment to promote COVID-19 vaccination and safety among racial and ethnic minority populations and other underserved populations and the Department of Health and Human Services will provide the funds in the form of health literacy grants. 

HHS said Monday that the office of minority health expects to fund about 43 projects in rural communities and 30 initiatives in urban communities for two years as part of the Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19 program.

Under the program, localities will work with community-based organizations to promote health literacy among rural, minority and other vulnerable populations. Funding recipients will use local data to come up with a disparity impact assessment and a health literacy plan to connect underserved populations to vital health services during the pandemic.

Applications for the new initiative are due April 20th.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma will jointly research unmanned aircraft system-assisted cargo transportation to advance the national airspace system.

The Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center (MMAC) of the agency and the tribal government will employ urban environments that are simulated virtually to study air traffic control, human factors and supply chain management as part of the organizations' memorandum of understanding, FAA said Monday.

“Our goal is to advance the development and integration of UAS into what is already a complex national airspace system,” said MMAC Director Michelle Coppedge.

The Department of Transportation has named Choctaw Nation as one of the nine active sites for the Unmanned Aerial System Integration Pilot Program that aims to facilitate advanced UAS operations through partnership with the FAA and industry.

Another goal is to encourage students to consider programs related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and possible careers in aerospace.

The Department of Defense has tapped Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University along with two other institutions to lead a center that seeks to augment the Defense Acquisition System's efficiency.

The Acquisition Innovation and Research Center (AIRC) will explore approaches in procuring resources and products that could support the U.S. military, Virginia Tech said Thursday.

Georgetown University and Stevens Institute of Technology will device policies while Virginia Tech will create a strategy that focuses on the development of data repositories, simulations and models.

Virgiinia Tech's Hume Center will oversee data strategy and the VT Applied Research Corp. will develop operational procedures. The university's Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics will work to obtain insights from intellectual property and award portfolios.

DOD has appointed Laura Freeman, Dinesh Verma, Thomas McDermot and Bill Rouse to serve as members of AIRC's executive team. AIRC is slated to host a forum in April to discuss the center's research efforts on procurement and digital transformation.

President Biden has appointed Timothy Wu, formerly a senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, The Hill reported Friday. Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, said in a tweet that he will join the White House as part of the National Economic Council (NEC).

He previously served as senior enforcement counsel to the attorney general of New York and held an advisory role at the NEC where he supported competition policy efforts under the Obama administration.

He also handled antitrust enforcement matters during his tenure at the FTC and is recognized as an expert on net neutrality. Beyond his public and private sector experience, Wu has also authored various books on the tech industry and holds a membership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Biden is slated to announce his nominees to lead the FTC and the antitrust division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to The Hill.