Managed service provider Redcentric is buying the "business and assets" of three datacenters owned by troubled Sungard Availability Services but it'll only complete if a volume of customers agree to new contracts.

Sungard went into administration in March following financial difficulties caused by steep rises in energy prices that the company failed to pass onto customers. And a last ditch effort to renegotiate its rental lease with landlords was fruitless.

The first portion of the business was sold last month when Daisy Group confirmed it had agreed a price to transfer the customers from 10 Sungard Workplace facilities to Daisy Corporate Services.

Now the trade and assets of Sungard's London Hounslow LTC Data Centre and Recovery Centre, along with the Woking TC3 bit barn and the Elland TC4 Data Centre and Recovery Centre are being offloaded to Redcentric.

Teneo, the administrators tasked with finding a buyer or buyers for Sungard's UK ops, wrote to customers yesterday about the sale of the server farms, as well as the provision of network services.

"There will be a short period between exchange and completion where services will continue to be provided by [Sungard]. In this period Redcentric will agree a new contract with you. Once the sale completes, the provision of continued services will be at the discretion of Redcentric if you have not signed a new contract with them," the letter states.

"Redcentric will be adopting Sungard's terms and conditions and offering market rates. It is therefore in your interests to sign a new contract with them such that you ensure continuation of services. If you do not sign a contract you will be at risk of your service ceasing from completion."

Customers are told to keep paying invoices "as they fall due", including power invoices, and anything still owned after the sale's completion will be pursued by Tenon.

"Please note that any pre-payments made since the appointment of Joint Administrators, where services have not been provided by the Company, will be refunded to you in due course. However, any funds paid for services in advance prior to the commencement of the administration will not be transferred to Redcentric, or repaid to customers, irrespective of whether the service has been provided."

Customers can of course "submit an unsecured claim for such funds" but they'll join the queue with other creditors.

Redcentric has also written to customers, saying: "If Redcentric is unable to agree terms with a sufficient volume of Sungard DC customers then completion of the acquisition will not occur and the Administrator will, in the absence of other options, close the Sungard DC business."

It adds that the "window between exchange and completion is three weeks" with contracts needing to be signed and delivered by 21 June.

Customers are being asked to sign up for a minimum of three years, and from the start date Redcentric says it will "immediately cease the additional electricity charges imposed by the Administrators."

These were up to 50 percent higher, according to the letter.

"Given that the electricity surcharges currently being levied by the Administrators will cease immediately on completion of the acquisition, we hope this provides a significant incentive to agree and complete new contracts earlier, as well as enabling a quicker return to a normal and stable service," Redcentric's letter says.

As for colocation prices, they'll rise "10 percent, with this price fixed for the three-year terms of the new contract," Redcentric's letter, seen by The Reg, adds. "These increases are in line with current industry market practice and will enable the acquisition to be viable from an economic perspective," the letter says.

Customers that want to transfer services from the Woking T3 to one of Redcentric's other tier 3 facilities will receive a 50 percent discount on colo prices for six months.

The minimum amount payable by Redcentric on all three DCs – assuming all goes according to plan – is £11 million ($13.8 million), and the maximum amount is £22 million ($27.6 million).

"Pursuant to the performance criteria, which expire 12 months following completion, there is a potential further up to £7.625 million ($9.56 million) payable. All consideration payable will be satisfied in cash," AIM-listed Redcentric told investors yesterday.

Further details of the transaction will be released once completion is agreed "due to the nature of the transaction and its dependence on new contracts agreed with Sungard DC customers."

Sungard employees at the sites will transfer to Redcentric under a standard TUPE arrangement, and all outsourced services will be brought on-shore within six to 12 months after completion, the letter adds.

Separately, Redcentric has paid £4.2 million ($5.26 million) for an AWS consulting and related cloud services business owned by Sungard.

In North America, Sungard's parent has filed for Chapter 11 in April, citing tough economic conditions caused by the pandemic. ®

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.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

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.

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."

Comment It's hard to suppress an eyeroll when the world's largest consumers of datacenter resources talk about sustainability. Putting the planet ahead of profits is often not at the top of the to-do list in large-scale, performance-driven environments.

Sure, the hyperscalers talk a good game. Carbon offsets, green bonds, and lofty carbon neutrality targets aren't nothing. But it's also the kind of thing that can only be measured on a spreadsheet. And it's certainly not the kind of tangible change that's needed.

It's great that these companies are offsetting their energy use by funding renewable energy projects, but it hardly feels sincere when your datacenters are still rolling coal.

Transitioning just half of all datacenters to sustainable operating models could cut global energy costs by $7 billion, Supermicro CEO Charles Liang claims.

Building greener datacenters was a central theme of the company’s nearly hour-long Computex keynote earlier this month, where Liang touted Supermicro’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions through modular server design and encouraging liquid cooling.

“It’s our responsibility to reduce the environmental impact of technology by using less power, reducing carbon footprint and e-waste,” he said.

With Intel poised to enter the datacenter GPU market, the chipmaker this week showed off a software platform mean to simplify management of these devices at scale at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The open-source software, dubbed Intel XPU Manager, is an in-band remote management service for upgrading firmware, monitoring system utilization, and administering GPUs at the individual node level. The code is an important step as Intel prepares to compete against Nvidia, which has a mature software stack for GPUs with AMD working hard to get its software straight for GPU and CPU.

XPU Manager is a low-level management interface that runs in Kubernetes and is designed to be integrated into existing cluster management and schedulers using RESTful APIs. It also supports local management via the CLI and is validated for use on Ubuntu 20.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4.

In the world of fabless chip designers, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm usually soak up the most attention since their chips are fueling everything from top-end supercomputers to mobile devices.

This hunger for compute is what has allowed all three companies to grow revenue in the high double digits recently. But there's one fabless chip designer that is growing faster among the largest in the world and it's far from a household name: Marvell Technology.

Silicon Valley-based Marvell grew semiconductor revenue by 72 percent to $1.4 billion in the first quarter, which made it the fastest growing out of the top 10 largest fabless chip designers during that period, according to financials compiled by Taiwanese research firm TrendForce.

Schneider Electric has revamped its modular datacenters, and announced an update for the EcoStruxure IT management software to cover the hybrid infrastructure scenarios that now characterise the modern world of IT.

Modular datacenters are not a new line for Schneider, but the latest range combines all power, cooling and IT equipment into a single pre-configured unit that can be delivered to customers in 12 weeks, the company claims.

The Easy Modular Data Center All-in-One is available in four standardized form factors ranging from five to 14 racks that can be pre-configured within an ISO 20ft or ISO 40ft unit – otherwise known as a shipping container – with power densities between 27kW and 94kW.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) roped the Lone Star State into its cloud empire this week with the launch of its Dallas, Texas region.

The $600 million datacenter campus, which broke ground in 2019, is located approximately 25 miles south of the Dallas metro. The site, Google’s 11th in the US and 34th globally, is the latest in an ongoing effort to expand the cloud provider’s reach to new markets.

“We’ve heard from many of you that the availability of your workloads and business continuity are increasingly top priorities," Stacy Trackey Meagher managing director for Google’s central region, said in a statement. “The Dallas region gives you added capacity and the flexibility to distribute your workloads across the US.”

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