Microsoft has revealed that it’s been experimenting with a “two-phase immersion cooling technology” to prevent its data centre servers from overheating and causing outages across its cloud-based communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams.

At a Microsoft data centre on the bank of the Columbia River in Washington state, engineers are submerging servers in a steel holding tank filled with boiling liquid.

Unlike water, which is seen as precarious to electronic equipment, the liquid used by Microsoft engineers is harmless to the server hardware as it’s designed to cool its processors by carrying away the heat as it boils.

The liquid has been engineered to boil at 50 degrees Celsius, which is 50 degrees cooler than the boiling point of water. The lower temperature has been specifically chosen in order to carry away the heat while allowing Microsoft’s servers to operate at full power without the risk of failure due to overheating.

According to Microsoft’s data centre advanced development group VP Christian Belady, “air cooling is not enough”. 

“That’s what’s driving us to immersion cooling, where we can directly boil off the surfaces of the chip,” he said.

Husam Alissa, a principal hardware engineer on Microsoft’s team for data centre advanced development, said that the tech giant is “the first cloud provider that is running two-phase immersion cooling in a production environment,” which is the next step in Microsoft’s long-term plan to keep up with the increasing demand for cloud computing.

The demand has been fuelled by the rise of remote working, which depends largely on the reliability of collaboration tools such as Teams or communication tools such as Exchange.

In fact, according to Marcus Fontoura, chief architect of Azure compute, two-phase liquid immersion cooling enables increased flexibility for the efficient management of cloud resources, allowing them to manage sudden spikes in data centre compute demand to the servers in the liquid-cooled tanks. The servers run at elevated power without risk of overheating due to  “overclocking”.

“For instance, we know that with Teams when you get to 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock, there is a huge spike because people are joining meetings at the same time,” Fontoura said. “Immersion cooling gives us more flexibility to deal with these burst-y workloads.”

Using specially-designed liquid to cool the servers is not only cheaper than air cooling but also more sustainable than using water, allowing Microsoft to meet its commitment to replenish more water than it consumes by 2030.

Nokia has announced a new deployment of its cloud-based convergent charging system on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The announcement is an expansion of an existing partnership between the two firms that aims to accelerate the migration of high-frequency charging applications to the public cloud for communications service providers (CSPs).

A convergent charging system is a telecommunications innovation that enables the ‘convergence’ of payment methods. This has emerged due launch of new multimedia services and the increasing prevalence of multi-play service offerings on mobile networks.

The idea is to extract more benefits with cloud-based 5G applications with CSPs tapping into new revenue streams from 5G-enabled technologies, such as IoT.

Nokia claims its Converged Charging (NCC) provides «true» continuous availability as its supports high frequency, low latency demands for an «always-on» charging system that a 5G economy would need. It offers CSPs the chance to run workloads on AWS and develop new ways to monetise projects as a part of their journey to the public cloud.

«The technological barriers of deploying charging systems on the public cloud, such as network latency, are decreasing rapidly due to faster-dedicated connections and far edge CNF deployments; while the advantages, such as having the ability to grow capacity for one-off short-range events, are increasing,» said Udi Israel, Nokia’s head of digital business product line, cloud and network services.

According to global consultation and research firm, Analysys Mason, SaaS and public cloud will make inroads into the market for monetisation platforms by growing more than six times its size by 2025.

Nokia suggests its NCC’s architecture can support CSPs at every step of their public cloud journey, from the deployment of greenfield sub-brands as a first step towards hosting testing environments to full production workloads of the main brand on the public cloud.

«As the world becomes increasingly cloud-centric, it’s important that our customers can leverage cloud-native solutions to unleash the potential benefits of the cloud and 5G,» said Fabio Cerone, EMEA telco managing director at AWS.

Google has won a major copyright case after the US Supreme Court ruled in its favour over Oracle’s claim that the use of its software code in the Android OS violated copyright law.

In the 6-2 decision, justices decided to overturn a lower US court’s ruling that Google’s inclusion of Oracle’s software code in its operating system did not constitute fair use under US copyright law.

Justice Breyer, writing the opinion of the court for the justices that ruled on it, stated that allowing enforcement of Oracle’s copyright would “risk harm to the public”. 

“Given the costs and difficulties of producing alternative APIs with similar appeal to programmers, allowing enforcement here would make of the Sun Java API’s declaring code a lock limiting the future creativity of new programs. Oracle alone would hold the key. The result could well prove highly profitable to Oracle (or other firms holding a copyright in computer interfaces),” he wrote.

Breyer added that the “lock” would interfere with, not further, copyright’s basic creativity objectives.

The court found that Google’s copying of the Sun Java API was “a fair use of that material as a matter of law”. The Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit’s “contrary judgement” and the case has been remanded for further proceedings “in conformity with this opinion”.

Kent Walker, Google’s SVP of Global Affairs, told IT Pro that the ruling is a victory for consumers, interoperability, and computer science. 

“The decision gives legal certainty to the next generation of developers whose new products and services will benefit consumers. We are very grateful for the support from a wide range of organizations, from the National Consumers League to the American Library Association, as well as from established  companies, start-ups, and the country’s leading software engineers and copyright scholars,” he said.

Dorian Daley, executive vice president and general counsel at Oracle, said in a statement that Google’s platform just got bigger and its market power greater, which has elevated the barriers to entry and the ability to compete lower.

“They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can. This behaviour is exactly why regulatory authorities around the world and in the United States are examining Google’s business practices,” Daley stated.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also has plans in the coming weeks to stop using Oracle’s financial software and instead use software from SAP, according to CNBC. The company’s core financial systems are reportedly scheduled to move to SAP in May, but for now, there is no other indication the company is moving other systems off Oracle.

Commenting on the court’s decision, Hannu Valtonen, chief product officer at Aiven, called it a “victory for the entire software industry”.

“If Oracle had won, Google’s usage of the Java API in developing the Android operating system would be considered copyright infringement,” said Valtonen. “A change to the fair use of APIs would’ve severely slowed down the current pace of software innovation and created more cutthroat competition between tech giants who could potentially block the use of an API without payment. 

“For startups like ours, the fair and open usage of certain technologies promotes successful innovation for everyone, and Google’s win is certainly a positive result for end-users.”

Oracle’s copyright battle with Google has been ongoing for 11 years and in 2018 it was seeking around $8.8 billion in damages following the ruling in its favour.

In 2019, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the copyright lawsuit between the two tech giants as Google petitioned the court in January asking it to overturn “a devastating one-two punch at the software industry”.

Microsoft has finally called time on its Cortana mobile app, with users in the US no longer able to access reminders and lists created in it as of today.

The company originally revealed plans to retire the app in November 2019 and it ceased to operate in the UK and other non-US territories on 31 January 2020.

US users were initially given a reprieve, but in July last year Microsoft announced it would retire all third-party support of the AI tool after 31 March 2021.

This isn’t the end of Cortana, at least not for now. According to Microsoft, the virtual assistant, which was launched in 2014, will continue “its evolution as a productivity assistant”.

The move was fueled by the product proving to be less successful among consumers compared to rivals such as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. At the same time, Microsoft also acknowledged the popularity of competitors’ tools by allowing them to become more accessible on Windows 10. Since September 2019, users have been able to open their laptops as well as Amazon Echo devices by calling out ‘Alexa’, while Cortana had been moved into a separate app in the Microsoft store and away from the built-in search experience in the operating system.

Sunsetting the Cortana mobile app is in line with Microsoft’s ambitions to transform Cortana into an enterprise-focused tool. In 2019, CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft envisions Cortana as an assistant to Office 365, which is also primarily a desktop-focused product, rather than a mobile one.

Last year, Microsoft announced the decision to improve Cortana’s integration with Office 365 by allowing users to manage their calendars and email using voice commands. The tech giant also combined Cortana functionalities with Microsoft Teams, making it possible to join meetings, make a call, share files with colleagues, and even send chat messages using the virtual assistant.

Oracle is offering new and existing customers free cloud engineering resources and tech support to help them migrate their workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The company has launched its Cloud Lift Services to give its customers “expanded access to technical tools and cloud engineering resources to quickly migrate workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI),” it revealed in a blog post.

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Oracle now offers these resources, at no additional cost, to all existing and new Oracle Cloud customers across the globe.

“Our customers want a seamless path to the cloud with the right guidance, solution architecture, and hands-on help we can provide,” said Vinay Kumar, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle Cloud Lift Services is just one of several changes we are implementing to accelerate customer success on Oracle Cloud.”

The company declared that its customers and partners are “already seeing value in this programme” and are getting through migrations faster, with more of their IT budget intact for other, “more valuable”, operational services and major digital transformation projects.

Through Oracle Cloud Lift Services, customers can access Oracle cloud engineers and premier technical services, as well as cloud engineering resources for activities like performance analysis, application architecture, hands-on migrations and go-live support.

The company will also work with its customers until their workloads are in production and will help train their staff on best practices.

“Oracle Cloud Lift Services together with Infosys Cobalt cloud offerings help our joint customers accelerate the work of migrating to the cloud and modernizing their landscape to drive faster business results,” said Gopikrishnan Konnanath, SVP & service offering head of Oracle Services at Infosys.

“As a partner, we ensure client success through outcome-driven transformation programs that build differentiated capabilities to help our clients become resilient, agile and competitive.”

Last month, the Home Office moved a number of its critical functions to Oracle Cloud in a drive to modernise its central back-office processes. This included HR, payroll, finance, customer support and employee analytics services.

In February, it was reported that rows had broken out within the government over cloud computing contracts given to Amazon. Some Conservative party members were reportedly concerned that the government was too dependent on one service, as Amazon had received a £75m contract for its services, nearly double that of its second-biggest vendor, Capgemini.

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Space agencies from both the UK and Europe have challenged British tech companies to develop new services that could support high-tech hospitals of the future.

The UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA) have made £5 million of funding available through the Hampshire Together programme, a digital transformation project across the North and mid-Hampshire areas.

The funding is part of the UK government’s Health Infrastructure plan, which includes provisions to build 40 new hospitals across England by 2030.

Tech firms have been asked to submit proposals for technologies and services that are inspired by space missions to a panel made up of experts from the UK Space Agency, ESA, and Hampshire Together. The panel wants to see not only ideas for the design and development of services to support new hospitals, but also the communities that surround them.

The initiative could potentially lead to new diagnostic tools, drones to track and deliver supplies, and also improvements to ‘telemedicine’ devices – technology used to support the care of patients remotely.

A new facility in Hampshire will be the first to use any services developed through the initiative and the ESA suggests this could even incorporate technologies pioneered on missions to the International Space Station.

«In the past but also more recently throughout the COVID crisis, the use of space technologies and satellite data has proven to be an essential driver for innovation in the healthcare sector to address existing and new challenges,» said Arnaud Runge, a medical engineer at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre.

Throughout the pandemic, the UK Space Agency has funded projects to help the NHS deal with the pandemic. This has included satellite-enabled drones that carry COVID-19 samples, test kits, and PPE to speed up delivery times and reduce traffic.

Technologies supporting bowel cancer care, compact 3D X-ray machines, and apps that target people at risk of social isolation and mental health issues have also taken inspiration from technologies developed via the space agencies.

Microsoft and LinkedIn have launched new features to help the UK’s 1.7 million unemployed connect to new job opportunities by promoting their skills and expertise.

The four newly-announced tools include a dedicated Service Page for freelancers and SMBs, a Cover Story feature which lets users share videos of their work, Creator Mode which helps turn a LinkedIn profile page into a content portfolio, and a Career Coach tool which provides personalised guidance for those entering the job market.

The Career Coach is a Microsoft Teams app powered by LinkedIn which uses an AI-based skill identifier to help students better understand their goals, interests, and skills. As a LinkedIn integration, it works by aligning a student’s profile with current job market trends and connecting them to mentors, as well as promoting skills, which LinkedIn managing director Josh Graff described as “the engine of growth”.

“There is tremendous value in job seekers understanding their transferable skills and ensuring they are front and centre when applying to roles,” he said. “Traditional hiring practices of assessing candidates based on their formal qualifications and experience means that so many capable people that are currently unemployed, or facing unemployment, risk being locked out of the job market since they may not tick all the “right” boxes.”

Graff also said that the «already uneven playing field» of the job market had been «further exacerbated» by the pandemic. Last year, LinkedIn was forced to axe 960 jobs, approximately 6% of its global workforce, due to the global health crisis.

Apart from the four new features created in collaboration with LinkedIn, Microsoft also recently launched a new online platform aiming to connect more UK job seekers with companies looking for apprentices.

Announced last month, the Microsoft Apprenticeship Connector seeks to simplify the search process by listing current apprenticeship vacancies across Microsoft’s network of partners and customers, such as Intequal, Firebrand, and GP Strategies.

Commenting on the announcement, Microsoft senior director of Corporate, External and Legal Affairs, Hugh Milward, said that it’s necessary to “change in how businesses identify, recruit and nurture talent”. 

According to Milward, “a truly inclusive recovery will require a skills-based economy and that only happens if you have a skills-based jobs market”.

“We are committed to leading that change by helping people get the skills they need to succeed and employers the tools to make their first of many skills-based hires,” he added.

The news comes just days after chancellor Rishi Sunak urged companies that had benefited financially during the pandemic to invest the money in driving the UK’s recovery and “create jobs in the process”.

According to the most recent ONS findings, 5% of the UK workforce is currently out of work.

For this issue of 20/20, we wanted to address a problem that most businesses will face in 2021 – the return to the office.

You’ve likely seen that a handful of companies have taken the bold decision to close their offices for good and extend the remote working policies that have worked so well during lockdown. The jury is still out on whether this will lead to long-term success, but to better understand the thought process behind such a drastic approach, we’ve spoken to those companies taking the plunge.

Elsewhere we look at the best ways to measure success in a cloud-first business, what green cloud might mean for the industry, and the pros and cons of using Slack and Microsoft Teams for inter-company communication.

We hope you enjoy reading this month’s issue. For more insight and advice, head to www.itpro.co.uk.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on 30 April – previous issues can be found here. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

Amazon is reportedly gearing up to produce its own networking chips in face of the global shortage, The Information has learned. 

The in-house chips would be used for Amazon’s internal IT infrastructure and AWS, speeding up the cloud division’s data centre servers as well as enhancing its artificial intelligence (AI) services, according to the information obtained by the publication. 

The move would diminish the need for the company to outsource production, which has proven increasingly unreliable in the past year. Although Amazon already manufactures its semiconductor switches in-house, their production is reliant on silicon supplied by San Jose, California-based company Broadcom. 

In April 2020, the chip manufacturer warned customers that they would be required to place their orders at least six months in advance, instead of the normal two to three months. Broadcom’s VP of sales Nilesh Mistry said that this was due to “unreliable” transport options caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It isn’t clear whether Amazon’s reported decision to develop custom silicon chips for its hardware network switches was influenced by this issue, but the move will likely make it easier for the tech giant to avoid supply chain disruptions and have more control over its own infrastructure.

Amazon’s in-house chip development will be made possible thanks to its 2015 acquisition of Israeli chip manufacturer Annapurna Labs, which the tech giant purchased for $350 million (£254 million).

Israel is also set to be the base of Google Cloud’s new server chip design division. Last week, the tech giant announced that it had hired Intel’s engineering veteran Uri Frank to lead its increasing investments in custom silicon.

Google Cloud’s VP of Systems Infrastructure Amin Vahdat said that the company is “thrilled to welcome Uri Frank as our VP of Engineering for server chip design”, adding that the tech giant had “long looked to Israel for novel technologies including Waze, Call Screen, flood forecasting, high-impact features in Search, and Velostrata’s cloud migration tools”. 

“We look forward to growing our presence in this global innovation hub,” he added.

Apple has also recently started equipping its MacBooks with its own custom ARM-based processors in order to lessen its reliance on Intel. 

VMware has patched a pair of vulnerabilities that could have given attackers access to admin credentials and file writing access.

The company stated that the first vulnerability, CVE-2021-21975, could allow a malicious actor with network access to the vRealize Operations Manager API to perform a Server Side Request Forgery attack to steal admin credentials. 

VMware evaluated the danger of the issue and decided it was an “important” severity with a maximum CVSS base score of 8.5. CVSS is an open framework for communicating the characteristics and severity of software vulnerabilities and is marked between 0 and 10, with 10 being critical.

vRealize is the company’s AI-powered platform that delivers “self-driving IT operations management for private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

The second vulnerability, CVE-2021-21983, meant that an authenticated malicious actor with network access to the vRealize Operations Manager API could write files to arbitrary locations on the underlying photon operating system. VMware evaluated the issue to be of an “important” severity as well and gave it a CVSSv3 base score of 7.2.

The company published a security advisory on Tuesday to inform customers of the two vulnerabilities, of which both were reported by Egor Dimitrenko of Positive Technologies. The products impacted are the VMware vRealize Operations, VMware Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

A month ago it emerged that ransomware operators were exploiting VMware ESXi flaws by retooling their strains to exploit vulnerabilities. The flaws, which were patched by the company, included allowing hackers to execute commands on the underlying operating systems that hosts the VCenter Server.

In February, security researchers warned of two ESXi hypervisor flaws that ransomware gangs were using to encrypt virtual hard drives. Hackers reportedly encrypted 1,000 VMs at Brazil’s Superior Tribunal de Justicia, whereas other victims suffered as their VMs were shut down and datastores encrypted and left with a ransom note.