Microsoft Acquires Fungible, Gets Composable Infrastructure Hardware

The acquisition, for an undisclosed amount, gives Microsoft hardware and software technology aimed specifically at accelerating data center storage and networking performance, including high-performance NVMe-over-TCP storage clustering technology.

Microsoft Monday said it has acquired Fungible, a developer of composable infrastructure based on the company’s data processing unit, or DPU, hardware for accelerating data center network and storage performance.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Fungible, which was formed in 2015 by Pradeep Sindhu, who at the time was co-founder and chief scientist at Juniper Networks, and Bertrand Serlet, raised over $300 million, including in 2019 a $200-million Series C round of funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund.

The Fungible DPU is a microprocessor aimed at optimizing storage and networking to offload those services away from the CPU, along with software to manage the control plane while allowing the building of a high-performance data fabric.

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Fungible also develops technology for building an all-flash NVMe-over-TCP disaggregated storage cluster called the Fungible Storage Cluster which the company claims overcomes legacy limitations to deliver best-in-class performance at scale as well as advanced power utilization.

Microsoft, in a blog post authored by Girish Bablani, corporate vice president for Azure Core, said the Fungible team is slated to become part of Microsoft’s data center infrastructure team.

“Today’s announcement further signals Microsoft’s commitment to long-term differentiated investments in our datacenter infrastructure, which enhances our broad range of technologies and offerings including offloading, improving latency, increasing datacenter server density, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing costs,” Microsoft wrote.

A Microsoft spokesperson, in an emailed response to a CRN request for more information, said the acquisition closed on January 5.

“Microsoft is acquiring Fungible because of its technologies that help enable high-performance, massively scalable, hyper-disaggregated, scaled-out datacenter infrastructure with high reliability and security which is a need of the datacentric era. Through this acquisition, Microsoft is looking to better accelerate datacenter innovation with low-power data processing units (DPUs),” the spokesperson wrote.

Reports of the acquisition first appeared in December.

Fungible was competing in an increasingly competitive market which includes such semiconductor and storage vendors as Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Lightbits, Liqid, and GigaIO, according to online news site Datacenter Dynamics.