Microsoft acquires Fungible to enhance its datacenter infrastructure

Microsoft has officially announced that it has purchased Fungible, a provider of data processing units (DPUs) which are hardware for accelerating data centre network and storage performance.

Intelligent network cards gave rise to the relatively new class of programmable processors known as data processing units (DPUs) (smart NICs). They oversee the flow of data through a data centre, offloading networking duties and assisting with application performance optimization.

With an emphasis on delivering multiple DPU solutions, network innovation, and hardware system enhancements, the Fungible team will collaborate with Microsoft’s datacenter infrastructure engineering teams.

Microsoft in a blog said “Fungible’s technologies help enable high-performance, scalable, disaggregated, scaled-out datacenter infrastructure with reliability and security.”

The Fungible DPU was invented in 2016 to address the most significant problem in scale-out data centres: the inefficient execution of data-centric computations within server nodes. The Fungible DPU is a microprocessor designed to optimise networking and storage so they can be offloaded from the CPU. It also includes software to handle the control plane and enable the construction of a high-performance data fabric.

Fungible in its blog said “We are proud to be part of a company that shares Fungible’s vision and will leverage the Fungible DPU and software to enhance its storage and networking offerings. We would like to thank our loyal employees for their dedication and hard work over these last seven years and our customers, partners, and investors for their belief and support in our technology.”

The company over a few years saw major competitions arise by big semiconductor manufacturing companies like Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Lightbits, Liqid, and GigaIO.

With this acquisition Microsoft hopes to enhance its wide range of technologies and offerings like offloading, improving latency, increasing datacenter server density, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing costs. According to the Microsoft blog, the team at fungible will join Microsoft’s datacenter infrastructure engineering teams and will focus on delivering multiple DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements.

Details of the deal haven’t yet been made public.