China-based server maker Inspur has joined the Arm server ecosystem, unveiling a rackmount system using Arm-based chips.

It said it has achieved Arm SystemReady SR certification, a compliance scheme run by the chip designer and based on a set of hardware and firmware standards that are designed to give buyers confidence that operating systems and applications will work on Arm-based systems.

Inspur may not be a familiar name to many, but the company is a big supplier to the hyperscale and cloud companies, and was listed by IDC as the third largest server vendor in the world by market share as recently as last year.

Inspur also announced the NF5280R6, its first product with Arm-based Ampere Altra and Altra Max processors. The Altra has 80 cores and runs at speeds up to 3.3GHz, while the Altra Max boasts 128 cores and runs at up to 3GHz.

According to Inspur, the NF5280R6 has been designed as a high-end dual-socket server aimed at a variety of workloads, but especially software container services running in cloud environments and big data analytics processing.

The system ships in a 2U rackmount chassis that has space for a dozen hot-swap 3.5 or 2.5in drives at the front, with a further four 2.5in drives at the rear, plus an onboard NVMe M.2 drive. The system board can fit up to 32 DIMMs and up to eight PCIe slots, plus there is an OCP 3.0 slot [PDF], a compact slot for a network interface card specified by the Open Compute Project.

Inspur claimed that the system can improve rack density by more than 36 percent while lowering the power consumption by more than 41 percent in comparison with equivalent x86 platforms.

The company said that it had delivered an Arm-based server to meet anticipated customer demand for such systems. "As the Arm architecture grew in the server space, we noticed that our customers focused more on the portability of platforms and the convenience of Arm-based cloud-native applications, which is exactly what the Arm SystemReady program provides our customers," said Ricky Zhao, deputy general manager of Inspur's Server Product Line.

"NF5280R6, the SystemReady SR-certified cloud-native dual-socket server, handles diversified customer needs, and provides computing power support for a more extensive customer base. In the future, Inspur Information will continue to bring more Arm-based values and innovations complying with industrial standards to our customers and developers," Zhao added.

Earlier this year, research company TrendForce predicted that the growing adoption of Arm-based systems by cloud service providers would see the Arm architecture account for 22 percent of datacenter servers by 2025. ®

RSA Conference Intel has released a reference design for a plug-in security card aimed at delivering improved network and security processing without requiring the additional rackspace a discrete appliance would need.

The NetSec Accelerator Reference Design [PDF] is effectively a fully functional x86 compute node delivered as a PCIe card that can be fitted into an existing server. It combines an Intel Atom processor, Intel Ethernet E810 network interface, and up to 32GB of memory to offload network security functions.

According to Intel, the new reference design is intended to enable a secure access service edge (SASE) model, a combination of software-defined security and wide-area network (WAN) functions implemented as a cloud-native service.

After taking serious CPU market share from Intel over the last few years, AMD has revealed larger ambitions in AI, datacenters and other areas with an expanded roadmap of CPUs, GPUs and other kinds of chips for the near future.

These ambitions were laid out at AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2022 event on Thursday, where it signaled intentions to become a tougher competitor for Intel, Nvidia and other chip companies with a renewed focus on building better and faster chips for servers and other devices, becoming a bigger player in AI, enabling applications with improved software, and making more custom silicon.  

"These are where we think we can win in terms of differentiation," AMD CEO Lisa Su said in opening remarks at the event. "It's about compute technology leadership. It's about expanding datacenter leadership. It's about expanding our AI footprint. It's expanding our software capability. And then it's really bringing together a broader custom solutions effort because we think this is a growth area going forward."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interview After two years of claiming that its Arm-powered server processors provide better performance and efficiency for cloud applications than Intel or AMD's, Ampere Computing said real deployments by cloud providers and businesses are proving its chips are the real deal.

The Silicon Valley startup held its Annual Strategy and Product Roadmap Update last week to ostensibly give a product roadmap update. But the only update was the news that Ampere's 5nm processor due later this year is called Ampere One, it's sampling that with customers, and it will support PCIe Gen 5 connectivity and DDR5 memory.

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.

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