03/05/23 What I Read Last Week
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
Global investment firm EQT has taken the lead in a group of investors nearing a deal to buy Radius Global Infrastructure Inc. The $1.33 billion deal could announce a take-private deal soon. Radius RADI 0.00%↑ reported 2022 results Wednesday, with record revenue of $135.5 million, up 31% from 2021, and gross profit increasing to $128.5 million, up 27% over the prior year.
VMware VMW 0.00%↑ announced an expanded collaboration with NTT Data, a global IT services and consulting company. The partnership aims to accelerate the path to software-defined, large-scale Open RAN deployments by leveraging their combined solutions and services. Open RAN (Radio Access Network), is a virtualized mobile network technology that allows for more flexible and cost-effective deployment of wireless infrastructure. Through this collaboration, VMware and NTT Data are working to make Open RAN more accessible and easier to deploy for organizations of all sizes.
Vapor IO announced it is working with Cellnex and Amazon Web Services to bring AWS Outposts (AWS infrastructure and services on-premises) to Cellnex’s carrier-neutral edge tower site in Barcelona, Spain.
“Bringing AWS Outposts into Cellnex’s digital infrastructure with Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid environment can improve the delivery of new, monetizable services by allowing for local processing on AWS Outposts. This makes it possible to reduce data traffic towards the core of the wireless and fiber networks while enhancing the ability to meet data residency requirements, making it possible to develop stable, low latency services that leverage familiar AWS services.”
At MWC 2023 hyperscale networking software company Arrcus announced the availability of its FlexMCN solution powered by Intel’s next-gen compute processing, revolutionizing cloud computing for enterprises and communication services providers. Arrcus CEO Shekar Ayyar spoke with Justin Springham at MWC23 about the company’s collaborations and advancements in 5G networking. The company also announced a collaboration with Equinix EQIX 0.00%↑ with the launch of the FlexMCN Multi-Cloud Network solution deployed on Equinix Metal.
On Monday SSD provider KIOXIA announced its participation in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) program. As part of the program, KIOXIA SSDs provide robust flash storage in HPE Edgeline and HPE ProLiant servers in a test environment to conduct scientific experiments aboard the International Space Station.
HPE HPE 0.00%↑ announced its intent to acquire cloud security provider Axis Security for an estimated “hundreds of millions of dollars”.
This acquisition will allow HPE to expand its edge-to-cloud security capabilities by offering a unified Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) solution to meet the increasing demand for integrated networking and security solutions delivered as-a-service. Axis Security’s Security Services Edge (SSE) platform addresses the need for improved application performance and increased network security as the number of remote users increases and as enterprises continue to migrate applications to the cloud.
HPE also announced (at MWC 2023) with Nokia the expansion of their existing partnership by signing a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly offer an open and competitive Cloud RAN solution to Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and enterprises worldwide.
Getting to Zettascale without needing multiple nuclear power plants. Another excellent article by The Next Platform about going beyond exascale to zettascale for High Performance Computing. At the ISSCC 2023 conference AMD CEO Lisa Su said that if a zettascale computer were assembled using today’s supercomputing technologies, it would consume about 21 gigawatts, or equivalent to the energy produced by 21 nuclear power plants. While Intel's CEO has set a goal of reaching zettascale by 2027, Su has proposed a more conservative timeline of around 10 years. The main challenge will be energy efficiency, as server efficiency is starting to flatten while supercomputing efficiency is doubling every 2.2 years
A new JPL- and Caltech-developed detector could transform how quantum computers, located thousands of miles apart, exchange huge quantities of quantum data. NASA’s JPL announced the milestone Thursday, saying that the Performance-Enhanced Array for Counting Optical Quanta (PEACOQ) detector is able to measure the precise time each photon hits it, within 100 trillionths of a second, at a rate of 1.5 billion photons per second.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Part of a wider NASA effort to enable free-space optical communications between space and the ground, PEACOQ is based on the detector developed for NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration. DSOC will launch with NASA’s Psyche mission later this year to demonstrate, for the first time, how high-bandwidth optical communications between Earth and deep space could work in the future.
Bonus map item:
Thinking about Deep Space Optical Communications makes me think of my favorite map in the solar system…. of the solar system…. NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System.
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