American Tower to buy CoreSite for $10B

American Tower agreed to acquire CoreSite for $170.00 per share in cash, an enterprise value of $10.1 billion when including the assumption and/or repayment of CoreSite’s existing debt.

CoreSite, which as of Q3 2021 consisted of 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets, generated annualized revenue and Adjusted EBITDA of $655 million and $343 million, respectively, in Q3 2021. CoreSite has averaged double-digit annual revenue growth over the past five years.

American Tower said it expects to leverage its strong financial position to further accelerate CoreSite’s attractive development pipeline in the U.S., while also evaluating the potential for international expansion in the data center space. The acquisition is also expected to be transformative for American Tower’s mobile edge compute business in advance of the proliferation of 5G low-latency applications throughout the cloud, enterprise and network ecosystems, establishing a converged communications and computing infrastructure offering with distributed points of presence across multiple edge layers. 

Tom Bartlett, American Tower’s Chief Executive Officer stated, “We are in the early stages of a cloud-based, connected and globally distributed digital transformation that will evolve over the next decade and beyond. We expect the combination of our leading global distributed real estate portfolio and CoreSite’s high quality, interconnection-focused data center business to help position American Tower to lead in the 5G world. As the convergence of wireless and wireline networks accelerates and classes of communications infrastructure further align, we anticipate the emergence of attractive value creation opportunities within the digital infrastructure ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming CoreSite’s talented team to American Tower and working together to capitalize on those opportunities to drive enhanced long-term value creation for our customers and shareholders as we continue to connect billions of people across the globe.”

CoreSite’s Chief Executive Officer, Paul Szurek, stated, “We are excited to partner with American Tower to expand its communications infrastructure ecosystem and accelerate its edge computing strategy through the addition of CoreSite’s differentiated portfolio of U.S. metro data center campuses. The combined company will be ideally positioned to address the growing need for convergence between mobile network providers, cloud service providers, and other digital platforms as 5G deployments emerge and evolve. In addition, we expect the enhanced scale and further geographic reach to provide a platform for the combined company to accelerate its growth trajectory and expand into additional U.S. metro areas, as well as internationally, leveraging American Tower’s extensive presence across the globe. CoreSite’s outstanding team, interconnection platform and data center campus portfolio are a highly complementary fit with American Tower’s existing communications sites, and we believe this partnership delivers significant value to CoreSite’s stockholders and will create an exciting new chapter for our customers, employees and partners.”

American Tower intends to finance the transaction in a manner consistent with maintaining its investment grade credit rating and has obtained committed financing from J.P. Morgan. 

https://investors.coresite.com

https://americantower.com/investor-relations/investor-presentations/

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KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners to acquire CyrusOne for $15B

KKR, a leading global investment firm, and Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to acquire CyrusOne for $90.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $15 billion, including the assumption of debt.

The $90.50 per share purchase price reflects a premium of approximately 25% to CyrusOne’s unaffected closing stock price on September 27, 2021, the last full trading day prior to published market speculation regarding a potential sale of the Company.

CyrusOne operates more than 50 data centers worldwide providing mission-critical facilities for approximately 1,000 customers, including approximately 200 Fortune 1000 companies. Services include colocation, hyperscale, and build-to-suit environments.

“This transaction is a testament to the tremendous work by the entire CyrusOne team. We have built one of the world’s leading data center companies with a presence across key U.S. and international markets supporting our customers’ mission-critical digital infrastructure requirements while creating significant value for our stockholders,” said Dave Ferdman, Co-Founder and interim President and Chief Executive Officer of CyrusOne. “KKR and GIP will provide substantial additional resources and expertise to accelerate our global expansion and help us deliver the timely and reliable solutions at scale that our customers value.”

“Today’s announcement is the culmination of a robust strategic review process conducted by the CyrusOne Board of Directors to determine the best path forward for the Company and maximize stockholder value,” said Lynn Wentworth, Chair of the CyrusOne Board of Directors. “This transaction provides CyrusOne stockholders with significant value and simultaneously positions the Company to even better serve its customers to meet their needs in key markets around the world.”

https://cyrusone.com

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Xilinx intros FPGA data center accelerator card for HPC

Xilinx introduced a data center accelerator card and a new standards-based, API-driven clustering solution for deploying FPGAs at massive scale for high performance computing (HPC) and database workloads. 

The new Alveo U55C accelerator, which is Xilinx’s most powerful Alveo accelerator card to date, delivers more parallelism of data pipelines, superior memory management, optimized data movement throughout the pipeline, and the highest performance-per-watt in the Alveo portfolio. The Alveo U55C card is a single-slot full height, half length (FHHL) form factor with a low 150W max power. 

The company says the new card offers superior compute density and doubles the HBM2 to 16GB compared to its predecessor, the dual-slot Alveo U280 card. The U55C provides more compute in a smaller form factor for creating dense Alveo accelerator-based clusters. It’s built for high-density streaming data, high IO math, and big compute problems that require scale-out like big data analytics and AI applications. Leveraging RoCE v2 and data center bridging, coupled with 200 Gbps bandwidth, the API-driven clustering solution enables an Alveo network that competes with InfiniBand networks in performance and latency, with no vendor lock-in. MPI integration allows for HPC developers to scale out Alveo data pipelining from the Xilinx Vitis unified software platform. 

“Scaling out Alveo compute capabilities to target HPC workloads is now easier, more efficient and more powerful than ever,” said Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “Architecturally, FPGA-based accelerators like Alveo cards provide the highest performance at the lowest cost for many compute-intensive workloads. By introducing a standards-based methodology that enables the creation of Alveo HPC clusters using a customer’s existing infrastructure and network, we’re delivering those key advantages at massive scale to any data center. This is a major leap forward for even broader adoption of Alveo and adaptive computing throughout the data center.”

CSIRO, Australia’s national research organization along with the world’s largest radio astronomy antenna array, is utilizing Alveo U55C cards for signal processing in the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope. Deploying the Alveo cards as network-attached accelerators with HBM allows for massive throughput at scale across the HPC signal processing cluster. The Alveo accelerator-based cluster allows CSIRO to tackle the massive compute task of aggregating, filtering, preparing and processing data from 131,000 antennas in real time. The 460Gbps of HBM2 bandwidth across the signal processing cluster is served by 420 Alveo U55C cards fully networked together across P4-enabled 100Gbps switches. The Alveo U55C cluster delivers processing performance with overall throughput at 15Tb/s in a compact power and cost efficient footprint. CSIRO is now completing an example Alveo reference design in order to help other radio astronomy or adjacent industries achieve the same success.

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Astera Labs' module enables copper-based Smart Electrical Cables at up to 800 GbE

Astera Labs introduced its new Taurus Smart Cable Module portfolio to overcome performance bottlenecks in data center Switch-to-Switch and Switch-to-Server interconnects running up to 100G/Lane for 200/400/800 GbE. 

The Taurus SCM enables cloud system integrators and cable assembly vendors to rapidly develop and deploy cost-effective, copper-based Smart Electrical Cables (SEC) with purpose-built intelligence capabilities to reliably address reach, signal integrity, security, fleet management, and bandwidth utilization issues in hyperscale data centers.

“Our new Taurus Smart Cable Module solution tackles hyperscalers’ emerging 50G and 100G/Lane Ethernet design challenges, which impact reach, signal integrity, physical constraints, power budgets and bandwidth utilization,” said Sanjay Gajendra, CBO, Astera Labs.

• Taurus Smart Cable Module Portfolio – key features:
• Supports 100G PAM4 (106.25 Gbps), 50G PAM4 (53.125 Gbps), 25G NRZ (26.5625 Gbps and 25.78125 Gbps), and other Ethernet line rates.
• Resolves rate mismatch between NICs and Switches with 50G-to-100G PAM4 & 25G-NRZ-to-50G-PAM4 Aggregation and Disaggregation with gearbox capabilities.
• Enables 36-dB reach extension for 3-meter reach over thin (up to 34AWG) copper cables, ensuring sufficient cable length and flexibility.
• Ultra-Low-Latency.
• Advanced fleet management capabilities with full CMIS features, security, and deep diagnostics.
• Qualified with leading cable vendors to enable Smart Electrical Cables (SECs) in QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors.

“Advanced PAM-4 100G/Lane Ethernet connectivity solutions must overcome complex design challenges such as reach, latency and power efficiency while keeping the cost per bit low to accelerate 400GbE and 800GbE deployments in data centers,” said Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst at the 650 Group. “Astera Labs Taurus Smart Cables™ play an important role in enabling intra rack connectivity based on active copper cables for the 800GbE interconnect ecosystem.”

Furthermore, Taurus SCMs enable a flexible supply chain of Smart Electrical Cables by qualifying with leading cable vendors to support SECs in QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors, allowing any cable OEM to integrate intelligent Taurus capabilities into their 200/400/800GbE solutions.

http://www.AsteraLabs.com

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Megaport offers Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN

Megaport is now offering the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform on Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) for enabling  branch-to-cloud connectivity via Megaport’s global SDN.

Aruba EdgeConnect customers can now leverage Megaport’s worldwide ecosystem of more than 700 data centres and over 360 service providers, with 230+ cloud on-ramps including Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Salesforce. 

MVE is a globally distributed compute and network service, and customers can host Network Function Virtualisation instances on-demand at the point of use, managing them globally from a single pane of glass. A built-in transit gateway provides highly scalable access for connecting networks, via the public internet, to Megaport’s private SDN. Virtualized devices hosted on MVE can create connections between the Megaport SDN and their distributed sites via the transit gateway.

“Integrating the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform with Megaport’s SDN will enable joint customers to achieve better network and application performance while reducing cloud costs,” said Vincent English, CEO of Megaport. “Since MVE is available in 22 metro areas across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, traffic can be localized allowing data termination to be optimised for performance.“

https://www.megaport.com/services/megaport-virtual-edge/

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Netography raises $45M for cloud-native network detection and response

Netography, a start-up based in Annapolis, Maryland, raised $45 million in Series A funding for its SAAS network security offering.

Netography’s cloud-native SaaS NDR ingests network metadata from on-premise as well as multicloud infrastructure to provide visibility and attack detection in a much simpler and easier to manage package than traditional network detection and response (NDR) solutions. The company’s technology deploys, runs, and scales using the full power of the cloud, without introducing additional physical or virtual sensors or appliances to manage, and without the challenges of unwieldy full packet capture and deep packet inspection solutions.

The new funding was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and SYN Ventures, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, Harpoon Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital. 

The company reports strong traction signing customers in the federal government and defense, aerospace and travel, financial services, utilities, and manufacturing verticals.

In September, Netography announced the appointment of Martin Roesch as CEO, and co-founder Barrett Lyon, network security pioneer, moved into the role of Chief Architect. Roesch is the creator of the open-source project Snort and the former Founder, CEO, and CTO of network security firm Sourcefire, which Cisco acquired. 

“The adoption of the Zero Trust model of security with its concomitant utilization of pervasive network encryption requires rethinking how the capabilities of network security can be delivered in the atomized networks of today. The appliance model and deep packet inspection will provide less and less utility as we move forward, and it’s time for a new architecture that addresses the needs of modern network environments,” said Roesch. “By upending this model and approaching security with the mindset of securing atomized networks, Netography provides security teams the protection they actually need for the way their networks look today and going forward as they embrace a distributed, Web 3.0 world.”

https://netography.com/overview/

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Santec acquires JGR Optics and OptoTest for optical test

Japan-based Santec Corporation has acquired JGR Optics Inc. (Headquarters: Ottawa, Canada), and OptoTest Corp. (Headquarters: Camarillo, CA). Both companies will continue to operate under their existing brands as subsidiaries of Santec. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Both JGR Optics and OptoTest are recognized leaders in fiber optic test solutions for measuring insertion and return loss of cable assemblies and components. 

Santec is a leading manufacturer of advanced optical components, tunable lasers, optical test equipment and OCT systems.

“We’re excited to enter the fiber testing market with the acquisitions of JGR Optics and OptoTest. Both companies have a proven track record of delivering high performance return loss, insertion loss and polarity measurement systems as well as optical switches to fiber optic cable assemblies and components productions" said Mototaka Tei, Chief Executive Officer of Santec Corp. "Santec is a leading supplier of test and measurement systems for Optical Telecom and Datacom and with this acquisition we widen our footprint the growing market for fiber optics production equipment. JGR and OptoTest both have complementary technology to Santec. The acquisitions will not only allow us to operate in adjacent markets, but will enable us to expand our product offering by integrating their technology into Santec's products and solutions.” 

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