The company announced this week the acquisition of Fungible, a composable infrastructure provider aimed at accelerating storage and networking performance in data centers with high-performance, low-power DPUs.
“Fungible’s technologies enable high-performance, scalable, disaggregated and scalable data center infrastructure with reliability and security“Microsoft said.
“Fungible team to join Microsoft data center infrastructure engineering teams and focus on delivering more DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems improvements.”
Terms of the deal weren’t shared, but initial reports of the deal last month pegged the price at around $190 million.
Data processing units (DPUs) are a relatively new category of programmable processors, originating from network smart cards (smart NICs). They manage the flow of data through a data center, offloading network activity and helping to optimize application performance.
Santa Clara-based Fungible was founded in 2015 as the first company to introduce such a product in the cloud and has successfully raised more than $370 million.
But the company, co-founded by the founder of Juniper Networks, has struggled to cope with the entry of larger players, including Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Companies like Lightbits, Liqid, and GigaIO have also captured market share.
Last August, the company laid off staff due to slowing sales and dwindling cash. SemiAnalysis reports that the company initially tried to sell Meta, but failed. He was reportedly in talks with Microsoft about a custom silicon deal, but as his options dwindled, he sold the company at a sale price.
“We are proud to be part of a company that shares Fungible’s vision and will use Fungible’s DPU and software to enhance its storage and networking offerings.“Fungible said in an announcement on its website.”We would like to thank our loyal employees for their dedication and hard work over the past seven years, as well as our customers, partners and investors for their trust and support in our technology.“
Microsoft said the transaction signals the company’s “commitment to making differentiated, long-term investments” in its data center infrastructure. The move follows the company’s acquisition of hollow fiber company Lumenisity last month.
“A data processing unit (DPU) has been proposed to solve the three main problems of data centers“said Pradeep Sindhu, founder of Fungible, in an article for DCD in 2021.”Data-centric computations are ubiquitous but performed poorly by general-purpose CPUs; network usage is low (typically less than 30%); server configuration, control, and telemetry interfaces are inconsistent and ad-hoc.“
Source: Microsoft
And she ?
What do you think ?
See also: