Intel Spearheads Open Data Alliance For Cloud UsersIntel Spearheads Open Data Alliance For Cloud Users

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A group of 70 current and potential cloud users has banded together to form the Open Data Center Alliance, a group that will issue a roadmap on cloud interoperability in early 2011. Intel ‘s inside -- as a technical adviser, not a voting member.

The participation by Intel is a sign of how uniformly cloud data centers rely on the x86 architecture. Even IBM, manufacturer of the Power series of microprocessors, built its Research Triangle Park cloud on x86 servers.

Speeding cloud development and interoperability is likely to speed Intel and AMD chip consumption. That’s why Intel orchestrated the alliance. It will set best practices and standards that allow enterprises to proceed with cloud operations.

The alliance estimates that $100 billion in cloud investments would be freed up over the next few years if enterprises could be “released from anxiety about vendor lock-in,” said Kirk Skaugen, VP and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, in a Webcast announcing the formation of the group. The initial 70 members represent a combined $50 billion in IT spending, said Skaugen. The Steering Committee of the group is composed of: Deutsches Bank, UBS, JP Morgan Chase & Co., National Australia Bank, Marriott International, Shell, Lockheed Martin, BMW, China Life and the cloud infrastructure as a service supplier, Terremark.

The group is looking to provide guidance on building cloud data centers and standards for the interoperability of public and private clouds by 2015.

Prospective members may join at Steering Committee level, Contributor or Adopter levels. Anyone building a cloud infrastructure may join at the adopter level.

“We believe the Open Data Center Alliance will quickly become a leading voice of the IT community,” said Marvin Wheeler, chief strategy officer of Terremark and chairman of the alliance in today’s announcement of its creation. It will seek to create “a unified voice for future data center requirements,” said Skaugen.

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The alliance expects to provide guidance on such issues as how to decide where to run a workload based on an enterprise’s security requirements and how to implement “proximity-based storage to minimize latencies caused by delivery of data of processors from disk. It will even address how to provide policy-based power management in a cloud data center.

The group has been organizing since April and will offer the requirements to meet "five prioritized usage models" of cloud computing with the first version of its "vendor-agnostic usage model" roadmap. It will supply the 1.0 version of the roadmap in the first quarter of 2011.

For example, one usage model will describe the unified networking required for cloud computing, where multiple network protocols for communications and storage are merged, to reduce the number of ports and amount of equipment needed to establish a cloud. The network, file and block protocols under consideration are Fibre Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI, NFS, or CIFS, running over 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The Alliance will have five Technical Workgroups to define requirements for usage models. The Infrastructure Workgroup will address usages of cloud infrastructure, including sending workloads to a cloud, running them, storing results and consuming network bandwidth; it will also cover how different devices may be used to access the cloud. It will be the group responsible for addressing the issues of unified networking.

The Management Workgroup will address how clouds should be managed from both the provider and user perspective. The Security group will address user security concerns that tend to limit cloud adoption, including data security and identity management.

The fourth workgroup will define cloud services "and the ways in which they may be used," to give cloud buyers concrete business models around which services are being and will be organized in the future. The Government and Ecosystem Workgroup will examine the impact of government regulations on cloud computing; it will also examine whether licensing practices aid or impede faster cloud adoption, according to the announcement. Intel said 20 vendor partners, including Terremark, stand ready to provide concepts and guidance to the alliance. They include Microsoft, HP, Dell, Nokia, AT&T, Citrix, VMware, Red Hat, Cisco, Novell and Parallels.