Intel Forms Open Standards Alliance For The Cloud

Intel has taken centre stage in the formation of an alliance of companies that want to create standards for a federated cloud environment.

At a meeting at CERN’s Globe for Science and Innovation centre, Intel outlined Cloud 2015, a vision which will be the goal of the newly-founded Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA). The alliance brings together 70 major companies that seek to forge a less proprietary cloud infrastructure.

Federated Cloud Offers More Choice

The main aim is to create a virtual data centre that is more efficient, simpler and open. It will benefit users because it will allow free movement from one cloud provider to another and from private data centre clouds to the public environment. The long-promised utility computing model should be the result.

Delivering this will require open standards which can be adopted by software and hardware vendors to allow the free movement of applications and data swiftly and securely.

There are three main goals of the Cloud 2015 initiative. The key target is the formation of this federated cloud that will allow enterprises to share data across internal and external clouds. Secondly, this will require the automated movement of software applications and resources and, third, the development of client-device awareness within the cloud services.

The cloud-based servers could, therefore, determine what processing should take place in the cloud and what should be tasked to a client device. The clients, such as laptops, smartphones and tablets, have differing processing capabilities and storage capacities which need to be accounted for to establish the most efficient execution of an application.

To achieve its aims, the ODCA has established a steering committee that includes several vertical markets. Companies named so far include BMW, J P Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Lockheed Martin and Shell.

Intel said that the ODCA will determine the future requirements for the infrastructure but the Intel Cloud Builders programme will be responsible for realising the vision. This programme has already developed 20 reference architectures and several more are on the drawing board. Current members signed up to the programme include Canonical, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetSuite, Novell, Red Hat, and VMware.

Cloud computing continues to dominate thetech scene, with a majority of users attending an eWEEK-chaired webinar this week agreeing that the technology can build better IT. IBM launched a cloud support lab in the UK this week, and Amazon announced a free introductory offer of a year’s service on its EC2 infrastructure as a cloud service.