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Power and thermal management equipment essential to building datacenters is in short supply, with delays of months on shipments a situation that's likely to persist well into 2023, Dell'Oro Group reports.

The analyst firm's latest datacenter physical infrastructure report which tracks an array of basic but essential components such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), thermal management systems, IT racks, and power distribution units found that manufacturers' shipments accounted for just one to two percent of datacenter physical infrastructure revenue growth during the first quarter.

"Unit shipments, for the most part, were flat to low single-digit growth," Dell'Oro analyst Lucas Beran told The Register.

He blamed challenging supply chain conditions and strong demand from hyperscalers which are expected to open at least 30 additional regions this year for the delays.

Customers hoping to get their hands on what Beran calls long-sales-cycle products large centralized, three-phase UPSes, thermal management, and cabinet power distribution systems, for example may have to wait between six months and a year before they even ship.

And the story isn't much better for products that are typically readily available. Things like single-phase UPSes, rack power distribution units, and IT racks have seen lead times slip to between four and six weeks depending on the vendor.

"Supply chain disruptions aren't going away by any means," Beran said, adding that while he does expect a higher volume of unit shipments in the second half of 2022, the improvement is likely to be marginal.

While supply remains challenged, Beran notes that some emerging technologies are gaining momentum.

He expects liquid and immersion cooling to see robust growth over the next few years as customers warm up to the tech. While liquid and immersion cooling combined accounted for just five percent of total thermal-management spending in 2021, it's a market that's growing rapidly up roughly 50 percent from the prior year.

What's more, interest in the technologies is at an all-time high, accelerated by investments by large OEMs and chipmakers. Last month, Intel announced a $700 million lab in Oregon to develop novel liquid cooling technologies.

"When Intel throws their weight behind something like that, and not just a little something, but $700 million close to a billion dollars that is a pretty large signal to the datacenter ecosystem that this is a serious technology," Beran said.

Despite the stark supply chain forecast for datacenter physical infrastructure, the sector's revenues surged six percent year-over-year in Q1 as pent-up demand was met with higher per-unit costs.

"When I look at datacenter physical infrastructure as a whole four to five percent of that was driven by price increases," Beran observed, adding that vendors are passing higher costs on to channel partners and customers.

The majority of this growth was realized in the North American, Asia Pacific, and Chinese markets, where Eaton Riello and Schneider Electric gained the largest shares during the quarter.

Short-sales-cycle products like single-phase UPS bore the brunt of inflationary pricing pressures during the quarter, according to Beran, who expects higher pricing to begin hitting longer-sales-cycle products in early 2023.

Looking ahead, Beran predicts datacenter physical infrastructure revenues will grow nine percent in full-year 2022, as improving supply chain conditions in the second half of 2022 are met with higher prices.

This growth will be fueled, in large part, by a surge of hyperscale and cloud spending this year. The analyst firm predicts cloud providers will spend upwards of 25 percent more to $18 billion on datacenter infrastructure in 2022 following record investments in Q1.

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Having trouble finding power supplies or server racks? You're not the only one - The Register

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More and more companies are using Azure for their cloud services lately, which makes sense on many levels. Other Microsoft platforms like Office have been the standard around the workplace for decades, after all.

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In addition, there are courses on the MS-100 and 101 for Microsoft 365, the MD-100 for Windows and multiple guides that can help you breeze through your first few Azure Administrator and Azure Associate exams. By the time you're done, you'll be an asset to any company that uses MS systems, whether they're working in the cloud or with onsite servers.

There are more than 225 hours of training in the Complete 2021 Microsoft 365, Windows, & Azure Bundle, and all 17 courses are now available for $59.99. That's under $4 per course!

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Launch your IT career with over 225 hours of training on Microsoft 365, Windows & Azure - ZDNet

Multi-cloud networking startup Alkira has decided it wants to be a network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider with the launch of its cloud area networking platform this week.

The upstart, founded in 2018, claims this platform lets customers automatically stitch together multiple on-prem datacenters, branches, and cloud workloads at the press of a button.

The subscription is the latest evolution of Alkiras multi-cloud platform introduced back in 2020. The service integrates with all major public cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud and automates the provisioning and management of their network services.

"Cloud was supposed to make life easier, but it has grown more complex as customers struggle to manage islands of networking, each with its own rules and tools. They thought they were buying agility, but what arrived was a mountain of complexity and technical debt," Alkira CEO Amir Khan argued in a canned statement.

He argues that today's network architectures were never designed for the level of change that the cloud has introduced. "Until now, enterprises had a choice between shoehorning last-generation technology into the cloud or using orchestration tools to hide the complexity."

Rather than building its own private network as vendors like Aryaka (yes, Aryaka) have done, or rely on telecommunications providers like many SD-WAN vendors, Alkira piggybacks on the global network backbones that interconnect the public cloud providers' datacenters.

For example, if a customer needs to connect a workload running in AWS to another running in GCP or Azure, the platform automatically configures and connects the virtual networks on each the respective public clouds.

However, since launching the platform, Alkira has introduced several additional capabilities including support for branch-to-branch communications and hybrid-cloud networking for customers with a mix of on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

The company has also announced integrations with several large security and network vendors like Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, and Aruba to enable customers to deploy the service alongside their existing infrastructure.

Alkira's Cloud Area Networks service consolidates these capabilities into a single platform, and adds support for Teraform and REST APIs for integration with customers' continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.

Altogether, this functionality has helped the multi-cloud startup secure multiple high-profile contracts with the likes of Warner Music Group, Tekion, and Koch Industries. The latter was one of the company's largest financiers and has deployed Alkira's services to connect its more than 700 locations around the world.

However, Alkira is far from the only vendor vying for a piece of the NaaS market. The business faces competition from the many of the same cloud providers on which its service relies.

As more enterprise workloads have made their way into the cloud, AWS, GCP, and Azure have all launched cloud transport services for customers that need to connect workloads running across multiple regions. Many of these services also support using their private networks as an alternative to multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) or broadband connectivity for branch-to-branch communications. Amazon's Cloud WAN service introduced late last year is one such example.

Meanwhile, Alkira also faces competition from traditional SD-WAN vendors like Cisco and Fortinet, which have leaned on these cloud transport services as a means for extending network architectures customers are ready familiar with to multi-cloud networking use cases.

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This startup says it can glue all your networks together in the cloud - The Register

Zscaler is growing the machine-learning capabilities of its zero-trust platform and expanding it into the public cloud and network edge, CEO Jay Chaudhry told devotees at a conference in Las Vegas today.

Along with the AI advancements, Zscaler at its Zenith 2022 show in Sin City also announced greater integration of its technologies with Amazon Web Services, and a security management offering designed to enable infosec teams and developers to better detect risks in cloud-native applications.

In addition, the biz also is putting a focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) control systems as it addresses the security side of the network edge. Zscaler, for those not aware, makes products that securely connect devices, networks, and backend systems together, and provides the monitoring, controls, and cloud services an organization might need to manage all that.

Enterprises are looking for ways to protect workloads and data that are increasingly being run, accessed, and created outside the central datacenter, making a legacy perimeter security defense more outdated, Chaudhry opined during his keynote Wednesday.

"Workloads, somewhat like users, talk to the internet," he said. "Workloads talk to other workloads, so zero trust plays an important role."

Zscaler has been banging on the idea of zero trust since the rollout of its first cloud services in 2008. Zero trust essentially operates on the premise that no user, device, or application on the network inherently can be trusted. Instead, a zero-trust framework relies on identity, behavior, authentication, and security policies to verify and validate everything on the network and to determine such issues as access and privileges.

It's a booming space, with analyst biz MarketsandMarkets recently forecasting the global zero-trust market growing from $27.4 billion this year to $60.7 billion by 2027. Zero trust has also become a buzzword in the industry, with a growing number of vendors claiming they offer such capabilities.

Chaudhry said his company is working to build out an integrated, cloud-based platform that gives enterprises tightly integrated services rather than a collection of point products that need to be pulled together by an organization.

The latest offerings are designed to expand what its Zero Trust Exchange architecture can do. Zscaler's Posture Control agentless offering is integrated into Zero Trust Exchange to prioritize risk, including unpatched vulnerabilities in containers and virtual machines, cloud service misconfigurations and excessive permissions.

It also scans workloads and detects and resolves issues early in the development lifecycle before they become problems in production. Posture Control is the second step in Zscaler's efforts to secure workloads, following the release last year of Cloud Connector, which Chaudhry said eliminated the need for multiple virtual firewalls.

"Workloads need to securely communicate, but in addition to that, when you are launching those workloads, you want to make sure they are configured right there are hundreds and hundreds of configurations around the workloads and you also need to make sure that the right people have the right access, entitlement and permissions," the CEO said. "In addition, you need to make sure the attack surface is minimized."

The new AI and machine learning capabilities integrated into the Zero Trust Exchange are aimed at both improving the user experience and better protecting the network against the rising numbers and sophistication of cyberattacks. According to Zscaler research, there was a 314 percent increase in encrypted attacks between September 2020 and 2021 and an 80 percent increase in ransomware attacks between February 2021 and March 2022, with a 117 percent jump in double-extortion attacks.

There also was a more than 100 percent [PDF] year-over-year rise in phishing attacks in 2021, it claimed.

AI and machine learning technologies are fed by data and Zscaler's security cloud inspects more than 240 million transactions a day and extracts more than 300 trillion signals that can feed the AI and machine learning algorithms. This now includes AI-powered phishing prevention, AI-based policy recommendations to stop the lateral movement of cyberthreats and user-to-app segmentation to reduce the attack surface, he said.

There also are an autonomous risk-based policy engine to enhance network integrity and enable customized policies based on risk scores applied to users, devices, apps and content, and an AI-driven root cause analysis capabilities to accelerate the mean time to resolution.

Chaudhry said customer demand drove the development of IoT and OT security capabilities in the platform. Enterprises said that many of their plants and factories rely on traditional security components that open them to ever-increasing cyberthreats.

"You can actually define those solutions within the factory floor or you can send telemetry from IoT or OT devices from your data lake at Azure, AWS or wherever else securely without doing VPN devices," the CEO said, noting that the company is partnering with Siemens developing and integrating products in this area.

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Zscaler bulks up AI, cloud, IoT in its zero-trust systems - The Register