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Intel and a number of its international partners proved to be in sharing frames of mind Oct. 27 when they jointly announced their new Open Data Center Alliance.
The new coalition consists of about 70 global enterprises representing more than $50 billion in annual IT investment and that have cloud research or projects under way, Intel Data Center Group Vice President Kirk Skaugen said at a press event in San Francisco.
Basically, Intel and partners believe that the only way for IT to continue to handle the skyrocketing amount of business and personal data–and the ever-changing number of applications to process it all–is for the industry and users to agree on data center components that all work together for the common good.
The thinking is that with those components interacting in better fashion, public and private cloud systems to be built in the future will then be able to work together more efficiently.
Key points in that common good, of course, would be improved effectiveness in computing, storage and networking components, so enterprises can serve their customers better, conserve electrical power, cut carbon waste and save physical space in data centers.
Members of this new industry group have pledged to work together to use open standards to create interoperable, federated cloud systems; automated movement of software applications and resources within various systems; and PC and device-savvy client-aware clouds that automatically know what processing should take place in the cloud or on a laptop, smartphone or other device.
An international steering committee
The new group’s steering committee has an international membership consisting of BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Shell, Terremark, and UBS.
The alliance will determine future hardware and software requirements that lead to more open and interoperable cloud and data centers.
Intel will serve as an adviser within the alliance, whose initial membership is focused on user companies rather than technology providers.
At the San Francisco press event, Intel also introduced another industry group called Intel Cloud Builders, which consists of 20 global-scope hardware and software makers, which will commit resources to promote innovation in the software development community to make clouds easier to deploy, use and share.
“The industry has an opportunity to accelerate the potential of cloud computing, delivering even better industry economics through this transformation,” Intel’s Skaugen said. “With the Open Data Center Alliance, we now have the world’s top businesses focused and actively engaged with Intel and the high-tech industry, accelerating solutions to the cloud’s key challenges.
“The server industry has gone through an amazing transformation since the Intel Pentium Pro’s introduction in 1995; our goal is to ensure that cloud computing continues to deliver breakthrough economics based on the same fundamental principle — innovation on open, interoperable standards.”