Intel pushes the All Cloud pedal

SANTA CLARA, USA: Intel Corporation has unveiled the Intel Cloud for All initiative to accelerate cloud adoption by making public, private and hybrid cloud solutions easier to deploy. Through a series of investments and collaborations in the cloud software ecosystem, Intel believes the initiative will help businesses take advantage of the cloud benefits to deliver new capabilities and digital services, leading to tens of thousands of new cloud deployments.

Consumer services from major cloud service providers have driven the first wave of cloud adoption, accounting for 75 per cent of current cloud usage. However, over the next five years, opportunities created from the Internet of Things and big data analytics solutions will be leading drivers for enterprise cloud growth. According to industry research firm IDC, organizations will spend an additional $142.8 billion on infrastructure for both public and private cloud environments in the next three years (2016-2018) to boost efficiency and business agility.

The Intel Cloud for All initiative will focus on three primary areas to accelerate new cloud deployments and help businesses get the most from their cloud infrastructure. It would be investing in the ecosystem to accelerate enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy software defined infrastructure (SDI) solutions; optimizing SDI solutions to deliver highly efficient clouds across a range of workloads by taking full advantage of Intel platform capabilities; and aligning the industry and engaging the community through open industry standards, solutions and routes to market to accelerate cloud deployment.

As a key part of this initiative, Intel is also announcing a new collaboration with Rackspace, the co-founder and leading operator of OpenStack, a major open source cloud software platform. Intel and Rackspace will establish the OpenStack Innovation Center to focus on driving enterprise features and scale optimizations into the OpenStack source code.

The OpenStack Innovation Center will include the world’s largest OpenStack developer cloud consisting of two 1,000-node clusters that will be available to the OpenStack community-at-large to support advanced, large-scale testing of OpenStack performance, code and new features, as explained further. These testing clusters are expected to be available within the next six months.

The companies will also focus on the delivery of new enterprise features and optimizations that are aligned with the OpenStack Enterprise Working Group and community priorities.

“The cloud has been critical to the digital services economy and has enabled tremendous innovation and business growth, but broad enterprise adoption is not happening fast enough,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We believe that through this initiative we will enable our customers to realize the benefits and innovations gained from the latest cloud computing technologies.”