Daisy Group to take on some of data management company Sungard's UK customers

Power and thermal management equipment essential to building datacenters is in short supply, with delays of months on shipments – a situation that's likely to persist well into 2023, Dell'Oro Group reports.

The analyst firm's latest datacenter physical infrastructure report – which tracks an array of basic but essential components such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), thermal management systems, IT racks, and power distribution units – found that manufacturers' shipments accounted for just one to two percent of datacenter physical infrastructure revenue growth during the first quarter.

"Unit shipments, for the most part, were flat to low single-digit growth," Dell'Oro analyst Lucas Beran told The Register.

The major hyperscalers and cloud providers are forecast to spend 25 percent more on datacenter infrastructure this year to $18 billion following record investments in the opening three months of 2022.

This is according to Dell’Oro Group research, which found new cloud deployments and higher per-unit infrastructure costs underpinned capex spending in Q1, which grew at its fastest pace in nearly three years, the report found.

Datacenter spending is expected to receive an additional boost later this year as the top four cloud providers expand their services to as many as 30 new regions and memory prices trend upward ahead of Intel and AMD’s next-gen processor families, Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung told The Register

Microsoft and power management specialist Eaton are working together on "grid-interactive UPS technology" using Eaton's EnergyAware UPS systems to help electricity grids with the transition to renewable energy.

The two companies already had a partnership where Eaton used Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform for products including an energy management circuit breaker smart safety device, and the pair jointly released a white paper last year on the potential role of grid-interactive datacenters in grid decarbonization.

Cisco's Nexus Cloud will eventually allow customers to manage their datacenter networks entirely from the cloud, says the networking giant.

The company unveiled the latest addition to its datacenter-focused Nexus portfolio at Cisco Live this week, where the product set got a software-as-a-service (SaaS) revamp.

"It's targeted at network operations teams that need to manage, or want to manage, their Nexus infrastructure as well as their public-cloud network infrastructure in one spot," Cisco's Thomas Scheibe – VP product management, cloud networking for Nexus & ACI product lines – told The Register.

Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.

Snappily dubbed OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the service was launched in 2020 and promised to run a private cloud inside a customer's datacenter, or one run by a third party. Paid for "as-a-service," the concept promised customers the flexibility of moving workloads seamlessly between the on-prem system and Oracle's public cloud for a $6 million annual fee and a minimum commitment of three years.

Big Red has now slashed the fee for a scaled-down version of its on-prem cloud to $1 million a year for a minimum period of four years.

Analysis After re-establishing itself in the datacenter over the past few years, AMD is now hoping to become a big player in the AI compute space with an expanded portfolio of chips that cover everything from the edge to the cloud.

It's quite an ambitious goal, given Nvidia's dominance in the space with its GPUs and the CUDA programming model, plus the increasing competition from Intel and several other companies.

But as executives laid out during AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event last week, the resurgent chip designer believes it has the right silicon and software coming into place to pursue the wider AI space.

Managed service provider Redcentric is buying the "business and assets" of three datacenters owned by troubled Sungard Availability Services but it'll only complete if a volume of customers agree to new contracts.

Sungard went into administration in March following financial difficulties caused by steep rises in energy prices that the company failed to pass onto customers. And a last ditch effort to renegotiate its rental lease with landlords was fruitless.

The first portion of the business was sold last month when Daisy Group confirmed it had agreed a price to transfer the customers from 10 Sungard Workplace facilities to Daisy Corporate Services.

Castrol, better known for its engine oil, has partnered with cooling specialist Submer to drive the adoption of immersion cooling for datacenter and edge applications.

For those of a certain age, Castrol will forever be associated with TV ads that proclaimed its Castrol GTX product as not just oil, but "liquid engineering." Now, however, it is teaming up with Submer to promote liquid immersion cooling as a way towards more efficient and more sustainable datacenter operations.

The two companies said they will work together on the global supply, development and standardization of next generation immersion cooling fluids. These are typically so-called dielectric fluids that conduct heat but not electricity, enabling components such as server motherboards to be cooled by being completely immersed in the fluid.

The venture capital arm of Samsung has cut a check to help Israeli inference chip designer NeuReality bring its silicon dreams a step closer to reality.

NeuReality announced Monday it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Samsung Ventures, adding to the $8 million in seed funding it secured last year to help it get started.

As The Next Platform wrote in 2021, NeuReality is hoping to stand out with an ambitious system-on-chip design that uses what the upstart refers to as a hardware-based "AI hypervisor."

In the world of fabless chip designers, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm usually soak up the most attention since their chips are fueling everything from top-end supercomputers to mobile devices.

This hunger for compute is what has allowed all three companies to grow revenue in the high double digits recently. But there's one fabless chip designer that is growing faster among the largest in the world and it's far from a household name: Marvell Technology.

Silicon Valley-based Marvell grew semiconductor revenue by 72 percent to $1.4 billion in the first quarter, which made it the fastest growing out of the top 10 largest fabless chip designers during that period, according to financials compiled by Taiwanese research firm TrendForce.