Big Data

New tools to make the hybrid cloud simpler and the cloud datacenter sustainable


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Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic made remote working a top priority for many organizations, which were forced to enable employees to work from home to maintain productivity. As a consequence, these organizations began to heavily invest in on-demand computing resources for remote employees.

As 2021 draws to a close, a wave of companies such as LiqidEquinix, and Aryaka are developing solutions to support organizations in hybrid cloud setups, so they can move beyond the limitations of traditional datacenter technologies in order to optimize throughput and performance. And today saw three announcements that suggest how these companies intend to help enterprises become more streamlined.

Today, digital infrastructure provider Liqid announced it had raised $100 million in series C funding from Lightrock and affiliates of DH Capital to further develop its composable infrastructure software platform, which enables businesses to configure and manage bare-metal servers with a software-defined approach. Digital infrastructure builder Equinix announced that it would be adding support for new hardware to its Equinix Metal service, essentially making a range of new Arm-based architecture and AI technology available to enterprises on-demand. And Aryaka announced new product options designed to support organizations in hybrid cloud environments.

Liqid’s software-defined datacenters

Liqid’s platform is designed to enable users to configure and deploy bare-metal servers in a matter of seconds, so they can allocate resources and increase operational efficiency. This software-driven approach means that users can reallocate resources in a way that’s much more flexible than the more rigid deployment options that traditional datacenter architectures offer.

The release comes at a time when traditional datacenters have struggled to manage AI-centric workloads in a sustainable way. The intensive power and cooling requirements of AI workloads lead to excessive power consumption and generate high carbon emissions that are not only costly for enterprises, but damaging to the environment.

In fact, researchers anticipate that by 2025, datacenters will account for the largest share of global electricity consumption in information and communications technology at 33%, almost as much as smartphones, networks, and TV combined (at 34% of electricity consumption).

Software-defined innovations by providers like Liqid aim to make datacenters more sustainable by increasing utilization rates and using more efficient resources that require less power and cooling.

Hybrid cloud tools from Equinix and Aryaka

Equinix will provide enterprises with access to the latest AMD Milan, Ampere Altra, and Intel Ice Lake chipsets (anticipated to reach the market in early 2022), providing organizations with on-demand access to the most powerful hardware on the market.

The service will enable organizations to build scalable-as-a-service offerings and gain immediate access to more processing power than they’d be able to with traditional datacenter technologies. The technology is already used by companies including Human, Solana Foundation, and Super League Gaming, which are leveraging it to build future-proof hybrid infrastructures and fulfill sustainability initiatives.

It’s worth noting that Equinix’s on-demand AAS hardware approach is also helping to address supply chain challenges, like the global chip shortage that’s expected to continue until 2023 and is preventing many organizations from moving to next-gen hardware.

Similar innovations are coming from providers like Aryaka, which today announced a range of new products designed to support organizations in hybrid cloud environments, including Aryaka SmartConnect Pro, a performance-optimized SD-WAN, and Aryaka SmartConnect, a cost-optimized SD-WAN.

This new suite of products provides organizations deploying SD-WAN and SASE architectures with cost-effective pricing models, so they have access to hardware with the performance they need to power critical business services.

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