Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners — the Alphabet spinout that focuses on building and backing new approaches to complicated infrastructure problems in areas like power, broadband and waste management — has launched its latest project, a new concept for more flexible data center energy management called Verrus. Verrus incorporates “microgrids” based on advanced, high-power batteries with software […]

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When the large cloud providers have excess compute capacity, they tend to discount it through programs like AWS’s and Azure’s spot instances. Any time a server idles, it isn’t making the company money, after all. NodeShift aims to take this concept and expand it well beyond the big clouds — and with stronger guarantees — […]

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Acquiring Linode allowed Akamai to fast-track its broader cloud computing ambitions. Today, the company is taking another step in this direction. It’s announcing the expansion of its cloud computing services to five new locations: Paris, Washington, D.C. and Chicago, which are going live now, and Seattle and Chennai, which will open later this quarter.

Akamai is also launching a set of new premium instances for commercial workloads, which will go live in these newly launched sites. Users of Akamai’s object storage service can now also store twice as much data: up to one petabyte and one billion objects per bucket. There’s also a new global load balancer, which bridges the functionality of Linode’s load balancer for local traffic load balancing and Akama’s global traffic manager and application load balancer.

“Distributed workloads require distributed infrastructure,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai. “Legacy, centralized cloud architecture was not designed for the demands of developers and companies challenged with delivering better user experiences that increasingly require putting applications and data closer to the customer.”

When I talked to Akamai CEO Tom Leighton at the Collision conference in Toronto last month, he noted that the company is investing heavily to upgrade Linode to “be usable by major enterprises for mission-critical applications.” He specifically mentioned upgrades to object storage, which the company released today. He expects will allow the company to bring a lot of its media customers to its cloud computing service.

He also believes Akamai has an advantage here because its vast existing infrastructure allows it to offer bandwidth rates that are lower than those offered by other major cloud computing services.

“Ultimately, we’re going to make Linode even more developer-friendly and easy to use as we deploy the software in the existing Akamai platform so that we can offer you containers in hundreds of places, for example,” he said.

Leighton noted that Akamai will bring on another dozen or so locations for its cloud computing services in Q3.

Akamai expands its cloud computing footprint with new locations and services by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

AMD is in the chip business, and a big part of that these days involves operating in data centers at an enormous scale. As the scale increases, efficiency becomes paramount, and being able to maximize efficiency for specific workloads becomes more critical.

AMD announced today that it intends to acquire data center optimization startup Pensando for approximately $1.9 billion. The company’s products include a programmable packet processor that manages how workloads move through the hardware infrastructure, moving work off of the CPU whenever possible to increase performance. The company claims between 8x and 13x better performance than competitive products from companies like Nutanix, VMware, Cisco and others.

AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su said that the acquisition is about helping data center operators lower the cost of ownership by using software to squeeze out every last bit of efficiency.

“Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level,” she said in a statement.

Pensando CEO and co-founder Prem Jain framed the deal in terms of being able to grow faster inside the larger organization than it could on its own. “Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our core business and enable us to pursue a much larger customer base across more markets,” he said. Jain will join the data center solutions group at AMD when the deal closes.

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategies, who keeps a close watch on the chip industry, said that this gives AMD a key set of software tooling inside data centers. “NPUs (neural processing units) and IPUs (infrastructure processing unit) perform network offload so that the server can provide a consistent level of performance for applications. While the solution requires chips and cards, the framework is all software defined,” he explained.

Overall, Moorhead said it’s a good acquisition for AMD, giving the company capabilities it lacked. “This gets AMD into the NPU or IPU market. It will compete with Intel, Nvidia and Marvell. Pensando has a very good array of enterprise and cloud customers. I like it,” he said.

The company launched in 2017 and has raised over $300 million from companies like Lightspeed Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, according to Crunchbase data. Customers include Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and Goldman Sachs.

The exact price of this deal will be worked out when they determine working capital and other adjustments from Pensando, according to AMD. Nonetheless, the deal is expected to close in the second quarter, subject to customary regulatory review.

It’s been quite a week for data center industry consolidation in the U.S. Two companies, CyrusOne and CoreSite, announced deals valued at $15 billion and $10 billion, respectively. It is unusual to see two companies in the same industry announce such large acquisitions on the same day, but that’s what happened on Monday.

Let’s start with the bigger of the two deals. KKR, a well-known private equity firm, and Global Infrastructure Partners, a company that invests in infrastructure companies like data centers, both saw fit to pay CyrusOne a 25% premium on its closing stock price of $72.57 per share back on September 27 under the terms of the deal.

The deal has already been approved by the CyrusOne board and, pending approval of regulators, is expected to close sometime in the second quarter of next year.

Synergy Research Group, which tracks cloud and data center data, reports that this is the largest data center company deal to date, easily eclipsing Blackstone’s acquisition of QTS for $10 billion earlier this year.

Meanwhile, CoreSite matched the largest deal when it announced it was being purchased by American Tower, a real estate investment trust (REIT), for $10 billion. It boasts 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets, generating $655 million in annual revenue, according to the company.

These companies may not be household names, but Synergy reports that they are the third and fourth largest U.S. data center operations, measured by colocation (the number of firms using their services) and revenue. Both companies have a strong presence in the U.S. market. John Dinsdale, principal analyst at Synergy, says continued growth at these operations is driving the need for increased investment.

“The level of data center investment required is too much for even the biggest data center operators, causing an influx of new money from external investors,” Dinsdale said in a statement. “In quick succession, ownership of four of the top six U.S. data center operators has changed hands, while the two biggest names in the industry – Equinix and Digital Realty – are increasingly turning to joint ventures to help fund their growth.”

Interestingly, investors do not seem enthralled by these deals in spite of the seemingly gaudy price tags, with both stocks down today.

Microsoft has concluded a years-long experiment involving use of a shipping container-sized underwater data center, placed on the sea floor off the cost of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The company pulled its ‘Project Natick’ underwater data warehouse up out of the water earlier this year at the beginning of the summer, and spent that last few months studying the datacenter, and the air it contained, to determine the model’s viability.

The results not only showed that using these offshore submerged data centers seems to work well in terms of performance, but also revealed that the servers contained within the data center proved to be up to eight times more reliable than their dry land counterparts. Researchers will be looking into exactly what was responsible for this greater reliability rate, in the hopes of also translating those advantages to land-based server farms for increase performance and efficiency across the board.

Other advantages included being able to operate with greater power efficiency, especially in regions where the grid on land is not considered reliable enough for sustained operation. That’s due in part to the decreased need for artificial cooling for the servers located within the data farm, because of the conditions at the sea floor. The Orkney Island area is covered by a 100% renewable grid supplied by both wind and solar, and while variances in the availability of both power sources would’ve proven a challenge for the infrastructure power requirements of a traditional, overland data center in the same region, the grid was more than sufficient for the same size operation underwater.

Microsoft’s Natick experiment was meant to show that portable, flexible data center deployments in coastal areas around the world could prove a modular way to scale up data center needs while keeping energy and operation costs low, all while providing smaller data centers closer to where customers need them, instead of routing everything to centralized hubs. So far, the project seems to have done specularly well at showing that. Next, the company will look into seeing how it can scale up the size and performance of these data centers by linking more than one together to combine their capabiilities.

Equinix, the data center company, has the distinction of recently recording its 69th straight positive quarter. One way that it has achieved that kind of revenue consistency is through strategic acquisitions. Today, the company announced that it’s purchasing 13 data centers from Bell Canada for $750 million, greatly expanding its footing in the country.

The deal is financially detailed by Equinix across two axes, including how much the data centers cost in terms of revenue, and adjusted profit. Regarding revenue, Equinix notes that it is paying $750 million for what it estimates to be $105 million in “annualized revenue,” calculated using the most recent quarter’s results multiplied by four. This gives the purchase a revenue multiple of a little over 7x.

Equinix also provided an adjusted profit multiple, saying that the 13 data center locations “[represent] a purchase multiple of approximately 15x EV / adjusted EBITDA.” Unpacking that, the company is saying that the asset’s enterprise value (similar to market capitalization, a popular valuation metric for public companies) is worth about 15 times its earnings before interest, taxes, deprecation and amortization (EBITDA). This seems a healthy price, but not one that is outrageous.

Global reach of Equinix including expanded Canadian operations shown in left panel. Image: Equinix

The acquisition not only gives the company that additional revenue and a stronger foothold in the 10th largest economy in the world, it also gains 600 customers using the Bell data centers, of which 500 are net new.

As much of the world is attempting to digitally transform in the midst of the pandemic and current economic crisis, Equinix sees this as an opportunity to help more Canadian customers go digital more quickly.

“Equinix has been serving the Canadian market in Toronto for more than a decade. This expansion and scale gives the Canadian market a clear and rapid migration path to digital transformation. We’re looking forward to deepening our relationships with our existing Canada-based customers and helping new companies throughout the country position themselves for digital success,” Jon Lin, Equinix President, Americas told TechCrunch.

This is not the first time that Equinix has taken a bunch of data centers off of the hands of a telco. In fact, three years ago, the company bought 29 centers from Verizon (which is the owner of TechCrunch) for $3.6 billion.

As telcos move away from the data center business, companies like Equinix are able to come in and expand into new markets and increase revenue. It’s one of the ways it continues to generate positive revenue year after year.

Today’s deal is just part of that strategy to keep expanding into new markets and finding new ways to generate additional revenue as more companies use their services. Equinix rents space in its data centers and provides all the services that companies need without having to run their own. That would include things like heating, cooling, racks and wiring.

Even though public cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are generating headlines with growing revenues, plenty of companies still want to run their own equipment without going to the expense of actually owning the building where the equipment resides.

Today’s deal is expected to close in the second half of the year, assuming it clears all of the regulatory scrutiny required in a purchase like this one.

There’s something to be said for consistency through good times and bad, and one company that has had a staggeringly consistent track record is international data center vendor, Equinix. It just recorded its 69th straight positive quarters, according to the company.

That’s an astonishing record, and covers over 17 years of positive returns. That means this streak goes back to 2003. Not too shabby.

The company had a decent quarter too. Even in the middle of an economic mess, it was still up 6% YoY to $1.445 billion and up 2% over last quarter. The company runs data centers where companies can rent space for their servers. Equinix handles all of the infrastructure providing racks, wiring and cooling — and customers can purchase as many racks as they need.

If you’re managing your own servers for even part of your workload, it can be much more cost-effective to rent space from a vendor like Equinix than trying to run a facility on your own.

Among its new customers this quarter are Zoom, who is buying capacity all over the place, having also announced a partnership with Oracle earlier this month, and TikTok. Both of those companies deal in video and require lots of different types of resources to keep things running.

This report comes against a backdrop of a huge increase in resource demand for certain sectors like streaming video and video conferencing with millions of people working and studying home or looking for distractions.

And if you’re wondering if they can keep it going, they believe they can. Their guidance calls for 2020 revenue of $5.877 – $5.985 billion, a 6 – 8% increase over the previous year.

You could call them the anti-IBM. At one point Big Blue recorded 22 straight quarters of declining revenue in an ignominious streak that stretched from 2012 to 2018 before it found a way to stop the bleeding.

When you consider that Equnix’s streak includes the period of 2008-2010, the last time the economy hit the skids, it makes the record even more impressive, and certainly one worth pointing out.

In spite of being in the midst of a pandemic sowing economic uncertainty, one area that continues to thrive is cloud computing. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft, which saw Azure grow 59% in its most recent earnings report, announced plans to open a new data center in New Zealand once it receives approval from the Overseas Investment Office.

“This significant investment in New Zealand’s digital infrastructure is a testament to the remarkable spirit of New Zealand’s innovation and reflects how we’re pushing the boundaries of what is possible as a nation,” Vanessa Sorenson, general manager at Microsoft New Zealand said in a statement.

The company sees this project against the backdrop of accelerating digital transformation that we are seeing as the pandemic forces companies to move to the cloud more quickly with employees often spread out and unable to work in offices around the world.

As CEO Satya Nadella noted on Twitter, this should help companies in New Zealand who are in the midst of this transformation. “Now more than ever, we’re seeing the power of digital transformation, and today we’re announcing a new datacenter region in New Zealand to help every organization in the country build their own digital capability,” Nadella tweeted.

The company wants to do more than simply build a data center. It will make this part of a broader investment across the country including skills training and reducing the environmental footprint of the data center.

Once New Zealand comes on board, the company will boast 60 regions covering 140 countries around the world. The new data center won’t just be about Azure either. It will help fuel usage of Office 365 and the Dynamics 365 back-office products, as well.

At a time where all of the news seems to point toward negative economic activity, Synergy Research released a report today that data center M&A activity made a strong showing this quarter, already surpassing 2019 levels.

The surge was mostly related to the $8.4 billion Interxion acquisition by Digital Realty, which Synergy says was the largest data center deal ever. It pushed the deal total this quarter to almost $15 billion on 28 closed deals.

2017 was the best year ever since Synergy has tracked these deals with more than $20 billion trading hands. That record could easily be within reach this year if this level of investment continues.

Of course, in the current economic situation, there is no guarantee that will happen, but it is clear that cloud usage is going strong and data center demand is something that’s not likely to abate any time soon. In fact, Synergy’s chief analyst John Dinsdale believes the numbers will continue to climb with lots more deals ready to close soon. He says that should make it a bumper year for data center M&A activity.

“In less than four months, the M&A value has already surpassed 2019, in addition to which we are aware of 17 more agreed deals that are pending closure plus a few other potential multi-billion dollar deals,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

He added, “Outsourcing trends and the aggressive growth in cloud services are driving ever-growing demand for data center capacity, which in turn is fueling both industry restructuring and a need to find new sources of investment capital.”

Synergy has been tracking the data center M&A market since 2015. Since that time, it has identified 388 deals totaling over $90 billion. Looks like that number is only going to keep growing this year in spite of external economic factors.

Google Cloud announced today that it’s a new data center in Salt Lake City has opened, making it the 22nd such center the company has opened to-date.

This Salt Lake City data center marks the third in the western region joining LA and Dalles, Oregon with the goal of providing lower latency compute power across the region.

“We’re committed to building the most secure, high-performance and scalable public cloud, and we continue to make critical infrastructure investments that deliver our cloud services closer to customers that need them the most,” said Jennifer Chason, director of Google Cloud Enterprise for the Western States and Southern California said in a statement.

Cloud vendors in general are trying to open more locations closer to potential customers. This is a similar approach taken by AWS when it announced its LA local zone at AWS re:Invent last year. The idea is to reduce latency by moving compute resources closer to the companies who need the, or to spread workloads across a set of regional resources.

Google also announced that PayPal, a company that was already a customer, has signed a multi-year contract, and will be moving parts of its payment systems into the western region. It’s worth noting that Salt Lake City is also home to a thriving startup scene that could benefit from having a data center located close by.

Google Cloud’s parent company Alphabet’s recently shared the cloud division’s quarterly earnings for the first time, indicating that it was on a run rate of more than $10 billion. While it still has a long way to go catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon, as it expands its reach in this fashion, it could help grow that market share.

Pensando, an edge computing startup founded by former Cisco engineers, came out of stealth mode today with an announcement that it has raised a $145 million Series C. The company’s software and hardware technology, created to give data centers more of the flexibility of cloud computing servers, is being positioned as a competitor to Amazon Web Services Nitro.

The round was led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners and brings Pensando’s total raised so far to $278 million. HPE chief technology officer Mark Potter and Lightspeed Venture partner Barry Eggers will join Pensando’s board of directors. The company’s chairman is former Cisco CEO John Chambers, who is also one of Pensando’s investors through JC2 Ventures.

Pensando was founded in 2017 by Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, a team of engineers who spearheaded the development of several of Cisco’s key technologies, and founded four startups that were acquired by Cisco, including Insieme Networks. (In an interview with Reuters, Pensando chief financial offier Randy Pond, a former Cisco executive vice president, said it isn’t clear if Cisco is interested in acquiring the startup, adding “our aspirations at this point would be to IPO. But, you know, there’s always other possibilities for monetization events.”)

The startup claims its edge computing platform performs five to nine times better than AWS Nitro, in terms of productivity and scale. Pensando prepares data center infrastructure for edge computing, better equipping them to handle data from 5G, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things applications. While in stealth mode, Pensando acquired customers including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp and Equinix.

In a press statement, Potter said “Today’s rapidly transforming, hyper-connected world requires enterprises to operate with even greater flexibility and choices than ever before. HPE’s expanding relationship with Pensando Systems stems from our shared understanding of enterprises and the cloud. We are proud to announce our investment and solution partnership with Pensando and will continue to drive solutions that anticipate our customers’ needs together.”