Our big story this week is from AMD. They’re opening up their wallet to the tune of nearly $5 billion to buy ZT Systems. The two companies have had a preexisting partnership, with ZT having collaborated on the EPYC processor lines. ZT’s biggest customers are AWS and Azure, as ZT specializes in hyperscale AI systems that are bought by the rack. This move follows a very recent acquisition of Silo AI, which we covered on the Rundown, as well as their last big acquisition of Xilinx. There’s a lot to unpack here and the Futurum Group has had some amazing coverage of this deal so far. Stephen, let’s start with you. What does ZT Systems have that makes them so attractive to AMD. This and more on the Rundown.
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1:48 – Morpheus Data Acquired by HPE
HPE has decided to make their Morpheus partnership permanent. Last week they announced their intent to acquire the cloud management platform company that has been an integral part of HPE Greenlake for the past couple of years. Morpheus has helped Dell, Lenovo, and others manage their private cloud platforms over the years and will continue to do so according to reports. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Read More: HPE Acquires Morpheus Data for Hybrid Cloud Management
5:31 – Launchable Acquired by CloudBees
CloudBees has picked up Launchable, a testing automation platform. Launchable uses machine learning and AI to streamline the testing process, such as determining if a failure will happen and halting the tests with an alert rather than running needless tests. CloudBees is looking to incorporate these automation workflows into their DevSecOps solution to help automatically test new updates and reduce hours spent troubleshooting bugs.
Read More: CloudBees Acquires Launchable to Advance Testing Using AI
8:26 – Kioxia Reveals Broadband SSD
Kioxia has unveiled a prototype SSD with a flexible optical interface that promises reduced power consumption and increased flexibility for data center designs. The optical link allows greater distances between compute and storage devices, supporting up to 40 meters currently, with plans to extend this to 100 meters. The company claims that this enhances energy efficiency and allows more scalable disaggregated computing systems.
Read More: Kioxia unveils SSD with flexible optical interface that can reduce power
12:43 – DigiCert to Acquire Vercara to Expand Security Portfolio
Security firm DigiCert has expanded their offerings in the realm of DNS and DDoS security by announcing the acquisition of Vercara. The company is the one behind UltraDNS, an enterprise-grade managed DNS service that provides speed as well as security from DNS hijacking. UltraDNS prevents attackers from using simliar DNS names to inject malware as well as offering protection against the latest distributed denial of service attacks that use DNS redirection. The goal is to use these new DNS security capabilities to offer more complete authoritative attribution. For more on this story, let’s turn it over to Futurum Group’s own Dr. Bob Sutor.
Read More: DigiCert Expands Security Portfolio with Planned Vercara Acquisition
16:25 – Western Digital Races Past NetApp with All-Flash OpenFlex
Western Digital has a new entrant in the lucrative market of powering hungry AI systems. The OpenFlex Data24 is a 24-drive NVMe SSD enclosure and supposed NVMe-over-Fabric RDMA access through RoCE. If you don’t know what that means then ask your NVIDIA cluster manager because that is music to their ears. Per benchmarks supplied by Western Digital, the OpenFlex can read 54.56 Gbps and write 52.6 Gbps, which is atypical of systems. This solution has been presented as a competitor to NetApp’s ONTAP and BeeGFS arrays.
Read More: Western Digital all-flash OpenFlex box outpaces NetApp in GPUDirect data serving
20:11 – Massive Data Leak From Plaintext Passwords
Fresh off the news of everyone’s social security number being hacked we’re on to the next one. National Public Data (NPD) is a data broker that does background checks on potential employees by aggregating public data and selling access to that data. Someone was able to get into the NPD database and is likely having a fun time matching it all up. However, the worst part of this comes as a sister site to the NPD database, RecordsCheck.net, was found to have a compressed file that included site source code AND plaintext passwords for users, including the founder. Once notified by Internet Batman Brian Krebs, the admins took down the file, announced plans to retire the site, and assured the Caped Cyber Crusader that the data in the file was old and totally wouldn’t work on their site at all. No way.
Read More: Data leak affecting everyone in the US, UK, and Canada was even worse than we thought
24:34 – ZT Systems to be Acquired by AMD
Our big story this week is from AMD. They’re opening up their wallet to the tune of nearly $5 billion to buy ZT Systems. The two companies have had a preexisting partnership, with ZT having collaborated on the EPYC processor lines. ZT’s biggest customers are AWS and Azure, as ZT specializes in hyperscale AI systems that are bought by the rack. This move follows a very recent acquisition of Silo AI, which we covered on the Rundown, as well as their last big acquisition of Xilinx. There’s a lot to unpack here and the Futurum Group has had some amazing coverage of this deal so far. Stephen, let’s start with you. What does ZT Systems have that makes them so attractive to AMD.
Read More: AMD Acquires ZT Systems for AI Rack Design Capabilities
40:15 – The Weeks Ahead
AI Field Day 5 – September 11 – 12
Edge Field Day 3 – September 18 – 19
Networking Field Day Exclusive with Nokia – September 24
AI Data Infrastructure Field Day 1 – October 2 – 3
Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day are now part of The Futurum Group.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is your look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
