GI Partners Closes Oversubscribed Inaugural Data Infrastructure Fund At $1.8 Billion in Commitments

prnewswire | September 08, 2020

GI Partners, a leading private investment firm, today announced the final closing of its inaugural Data Infrastructure Fund, which totaled $1.8 billion in commitments from a broad group of investors.  The fund was oversubscribed and surpassed its initial target of $1.25 billion. The GI Data Infrastructure Fund continues the firm's 20-year history of control-oriented investing in hard asset infrastructure companies and properties underpinning the digital economy.  The Fund will invest across four data infrastructure subsectors data centers, data transport, wireless access, and tech-enabled infrastructure, primarily in North America.  The team, which works closely with the firm's private equity and real estate teams and leverages the firm's broad resources, is led by Steve Smith, who was previously CEO of Equinix (the world's largest data center company), and Mark Prybutok, an experienced data infrastructure investor.

Spotlight

ASUS ESC N8-E11 is a Intel dual-socket #NVIDIA #HGX H100 8-GPU #AI server designed to accelerate the development of AI and data science and provides effective cooling and innovative components that deliver thermal efficiency, scalability, and unprecedented performance

Spotlight

ASUS ESC N8-E11 is a Intel dual-socket #NVIDIA #HGX H100 8-GPU #AI server designed to accelerate the development of AI and data science and provides effective cooling and innovative components that deliver thermal efficiency, scalability, and unprecedented performance

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Digital Realty Announces Its First NVIDIA DGX H100-Ready Data Center

prnewswire | July 11, 2023

Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions, announces KIX13, its newest data center in Osaka, Japan, has been certified NVIDIA DGX H100-ready as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Center program. KIX13 was awarded the accreditation for its ability to provide a dedicated, robust, and resilient environment optimized for intensive computing systems deployments at scale. DGX H100, the fourth generation of NVIDIA's purpose-built artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, is the foundation of NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ that provides the computational power necessary to train today's state-of-the-art deep learning AI models and fuel innovation well into the future. With it, enterprise customers can devise full-stack solutions that accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployments, allowing for data localization while meeting the global coverage, capacity and connectivity needs that come with deploying AI at scale. AI is swiftly becoming a driving force behind modern technologies across multiple industries with applications in areas such as optimization, preventive maintenance, virtual assistants, fraud detection, and anomaly detection. Expected to help solve the world's most challenging problems, the success of AI deployments is dependent on data centers that can provide the high-performance cooling, layout and connectivity required for AI to operate highly effectively. As modern enterprises adopt AI, leaders in the technology are increasingly seeking access to real-time data as a core strategy to enable instantaneous changes and decision-making. Digital Realty's highly connected PlatformDIGITAL® community enables customers to access vast data volumes, allowing them to confidently run AI workloads in an NVIDIA-accelerated environment to innovate and solve the world's most challenging computational problems, while overcoming Data Gravity barriers. With ServiceFabric™, Digital Realty's global service orchestration platform, customers can streamline management of their hybrid IT infrastructure while gaining access to a growing, open community of partners to which they can connect and utilize for managed services – all on a single, centralized platform. Thanks to the scale and sophistication of its offerings, broad customer base, and significant technical resources, Digital Realty also provides the precision-engineered power and cooling digital infrastructure that can support the high-power computing needs of AI. At higher workload densities, liquid cooling becomes an attractive option for AI deployments for its more efficient heat dissipation. Digital Realty's rich pedigree in data center engineering allows Digital Realty to provision a future-ready data center environment that can handle the evolution from air to liquid cooling. This also contributes to Digital Realty's and its customers' progress towards reducing their Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 68% and Scope 3 emissions by 24%, by 2030. The KIX13 certification marks another milestone in Digital Realty's and NVIDIA's collaboration. Digital Realty was one of the first data center providers to be awarded the "DGX-Ready Data Center" certification at the launch of the program in 2019 and currently operates DGX-Ready data centers in more than 20 markets worldwide, including six sites across Asia Pacific. "Organizations looking to implement enterprise AI are investing in accelerated computing infrastructure – including hardware and software purpose-built for AI – to deploy their models into production quickly," says Charlie Boyle, Vice President, DGX systems, NVIDIA. "With the certification of Digital Realty's new KIX13 facility in the DGX-ready data center program, customers have access to a flexible, simple option for deploying the world's leading AI platform." "Digital Realty understands the impact AI will have on the way businesses drive digital transformation in the years to come. However, business breakthroughs made possible with AI can only be realized if enterprises are able to integrate the technology into their operations, and that is where we come in," says Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty. "With Digital Realty's KIX13 DGX-Ready Data Center certification, we remain focused on delivering a meeting place that allows our customers to accelerate innovation and growth." He added, "AI is poised to have a dramatic impact on digital transformation initiatives, and it is critical to have a foundation in place to remove the Data Gravity barriers that inhibit innovation. PlatformDIGITAL® provides an ideal location for the data aggregation, staging, analytics, and management that are critical for optimizing data exchange and maintaining data compliance." About Digital Realty Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company's global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx ®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 27 countries on six continents.

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Storage Management

Apptio Integrates with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

PRnewswire | June 30, 2023

Apptio, Inc., the leading technology spend and value management company and member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), announces its most recent integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to help customers understand, visualize, and optimize their cloud environments through direct access to Apptio's Cloudability suite of products. With the current economic environment putting increasing pressure on businesses, it is critical that every technology investment demonstrates return on investment. With Apptio's cloud cost management expertise running alongside OCI's services, organizations will have a better lens into their OCI investments and support business growth through their OCI environments. Integration with Cloudability's market-leading FinOps capabilities will provide joint customers globally with insights to drive better cloud cost management and optimization decisions. "We are proud to announce our integration with OCI following its incredible growth," said Eugene Khvostov, Chief Product Officer at Apptio. "Our mutual customers continue to see increasing value from using both OCI and Cloudability, further reinforcing the need to combine these capabilities for a more seamless customer experience. It is a huge step forward, especially as many businesses turn to hybrid cloud infrastructure to address the complex needs of today's business operations. OCI customers will find value in the capabilities provided by Apptio's cloud financial management leadership and expertise." "OCI is designed to support customers with more deployment options, improved security and significant price performance advantages," said Chris Sullivan, VP Strategic Partnerships, Oracle. "With Apptio our customers have another powerful tool to maximize productivity and help ensure they are getting the most value out of their OCI environments." About Apptio Apptio is a leading technology spend and value management company for financial and operational decisions across Information Technology (IT), multi-cloud FinOps, and portfolio development resources. Apptio's mission is to deliver business value with every technology investment. Powered by Apptio's cloud platform and AI/ML data engine, Apptio's SaaS applications translate technology costs into clear business outcomes and financial ROI. As a trusted leader in FinOps and Technology Business Management (TBM) with thousands of customers worldwide, Apptio empowers leaders to cut costs and redirect investments to cloud innovation and digital transformation.

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Application Infrastructure, Data Storage

Elisa and Wind River Deploy First Fully Automated Edge Data Center for Commercial Service, Able to Reduce Staff Hours by Up to 90%

businesswire | August 01, 2023

Elisa Oyj, a leading telecommunications company, has achieved a significant milestone in the field of edge computing with the successful deployment of its first fully automated edge data center site, which is the second edge site to go into commercial production this year. This groundbreaking project combines Wind River Studio Cloud Platform as the production-grade distributed Kubernetes solution for managing cloud infrastructure, User Plane Function (UPF) application from Elisa’s current 5G core vendor, and the advanced capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, an industry leading platform that delivers a single pane of glass to manage and automate applications deployment in large-scale distributed environments. The deployment of this state-of-the-art edge data center site represents a significant achievement to strengthen Elisa’s position as the leading digital service provider in automating operations. It showcases the company's commitment to embracing next-generation technologies to unlock the potential of edge computing for a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing. ”We are delighted to continue our efficient collaboration with Wind River and take the first Fully Automated Edge Data Center into commercial service. Constant automation development is our key to future success. Combined with Wind River´s distributed cloud capabilities, we are able to further improve our customer satisfaction by reducing the time to deploy and adding the quality of the process. This strengthens Elisa’s position as the leading digital service provider in automating operations and edge deployments," says Markus Kinnunen, Vice President, Cloud Services, Elisa. “As a leader in the 5G landscape that powers the majority of 5G vRAN/O-RAN deployments with global operators, our Wind River Studio capabilities address service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low latency cloud-native infrastructure,” said Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer, Wind River. “Elisa is an innovator, and with their recent milestone, they are helping to advance the industry.” Key to this achievement is the collaboration between the industry leaders. Wind River Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. Elisa's 5G core UPF application enhances network performance, ensuring efficient and reliable data transmission and processing at the edge. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, the deployment process becomes fully automated, enabling rapid and efficient provisioning of edge data center resources. The major outcomes can be grouped in three areas: time to prepare, time to deploy and quality of the process: Time to prepare: The biggest savings came from parameter settings followed by environment preparation work. The team was able to execute hundreds of tests and scripts before going into live network in the same amount of time that it would typically take to manually run much fewer tests in the traditional model. Time to deploy: The overall Operator time, measured in terms of staff hours, for commissioning the edge DC site from preparation, parameter settings to complete installation and testing is reduced by 90% as compared to doing the very same tasks manually. Furthermore, the overall deployment time is reduced by around 50% thanks to the automation of the processes. Quality of the process: Finally, automation brings in additional benefits where multiple tasks can now be run in parallel with minimal probability of human errors, reducing time to service and enhancing network quality. The successful implementation of this milestone project paves the way for future advancements in edge computing by Elisa. It sets a precedent for the seamless integration of Studio Cloud Platform, critical applications, and automation technologies, empowering industries to accelerate digital transformation and unlock new possibilities. The collaborative effort involved in this achievement underscores the commitment of Elisa and its technology partner Wind River to drive innovation and push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of edge computing. Elisa continues to position itself as a leader in cutting-edge technologies, driving economic growth and benefits to the society. AboutWind River Wind River is a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems. For 40 years, the company has been an innovator and pioneer, powering billions of devices and systems that require the highest levels of security, safety, and reliability. Wind River software and expertise are accelerating digital transformation across industries, including automotive, aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, and telecommunications. The company offers a comprehensive portfolio supported by world-class professional services and support and a broad partner ecosystem.

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