Intel to acquire Granulate Cloud Solutions

Intel Corporation has announced an agreement to acquire Granulate Cloud Solutions, an Israel-based developer of real-time continuous optimisation software that has collaborated with Intel over the past year on workload optimisation of Xeon deployments. Intel said the acquisition will help cloud and data centre customers maximise compute workload performance and reduce infrastructure and cloud costs. Deal terms are not being disclosed.

While cloud computing and microservices have created a new era of flexibility in distributed applications and deployment scalability, modern architectures have introduced more complex performance issues that are not easily managed by traditional operating systems and runtimes. Additionally, customers often deploy older Linux distributions and application libraries that are not up to date with the latest advancements in today’s high-performance CPUs.

Granulate’s autonomous optimisation service solves these issues by reducing CPU utilisation and application latencies. It does this by learning the customer’s application and deploying a customised set of continuous optimisations at runtime. This enables deployment on smaller compute clusters and instance types to improve application performance and drive down cloud and data centre costs. Granulate’s service does not require developer intervention nor does it require the customer to make changes to its own code. Optimisations for the latest CPUs can be applied even on legacy Linux distributions and runtimes.

“Today’s cloud and data centre customers demand scalable, high-performance software to make the most of their hardware deployments,” said Sandra Rivera, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Datacenter and AI Group at Intel. “Granulate’s cutting-edge autonomous optimisation software can be applied to production workloads without requiring the customer to make changes to its code, driving optimised hardware and software value for every cloud and data centre customer.”

Greg Lavender, Chief Technology Officer, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group at Intel, added, “We are building our portfolio of software optimisation tools that offer flexible and scalable capabilities that allow us to meet the growing demand of the ubiquitous compute era. Granulate’s innovative approach to real-time optimisation software complements Intel’s existing capabilities by helping customers realise performance gains, cloud cost reductions and continual workload learning.”

Granulate’s autonomous optimisation service enables cloud and data centre customers to improve the performance of their deployments, reduce operational overhead and lower application costs. The acquisition will see Intel rapidly scale Granulate’s optimisation software, including across Intel’s data centre portfolio.

“Together with Intel, we believe we can help customers achieve meaningful cost reductions and five times the throughput across workloads,” said Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate. “As a part of Intel, Granulate will be able to deliver autonomous optimisation capabilities to even more customers globally and rapidly expand its offering with the help of Intel’s 19,000 software engineers.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022, subject to typical closing conditions. At that time, Granulate’s approximately 120 employees will be integrated into Intel’s Datacenter and AI business unit.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/SFIO CRACHO

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