Unifying the Voice of IT as We Head into the Cloud

Raejeanne Skillern is director of cloud computing marketing for Intel. Follow her on Twitter @RaejeanneS

Raejeanne_Skillern

At Intel, we love technology inflection points. That’s one reason why we are excited about cloud computing. With the rise of the cloud, today’s approach to the delivery and consumption of IT services is poised to change in dramatic ways—and change for the better—especially if we work together to accelerate this change.

As we witnessed data center infrastructure evolve to a cloud model, we knew the industry would benefit from open and interoperable approaches to cloud deployments that delivered flexibility and choice as well as leading-edge technologies. With those goals in mind, we helped create the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a consortium of top global businesses unified by Intel.

The Open Data Center Alliance this week moved forward with the development of usage models to drive interoperability, flexibility and industry standards for cloud and next-generation data centers. In these efforts, the organization has a tremendous amount of momentum.Since its launch in October 2010, the ODCA has quadrupled in membership across multiple geographies and verticals, and they have also engaged with industry standards bodies and vendors.

That same momentum is shown in the development of the ODCA’s first usage model release, which defines high-priority usage models and corresponding IT requirements laid out in a vendor-agnostic fashion. The just-released publication includes eight specific usage models that create a foundation for secure federation, improved data center agility, and increased cloud efficiency—all based on open solutions.

With this release, the ODCA is unifying the voice of IT and providing solid direction to the solution provider community. This is one of the keys to accelerating the adoption of private cloud infrastructure and bringing public cloud services into the enterprise. This clear direction to the solution provider community will allow solution development to begin immediately as ODCA members incorporate the requirements into their data center purchase planning.

This unified voice is also one of the keys to our cloud strategy. We strive to understand the requirements of enterprise IT teams and service providers who are deploying cloud infrastructure and next-generation data centers. We then take those requirements and funnel them into our planning process to deliver specific technologies that are optimized to drive advancements in security, efficiency, and management, while providing the flexibility and choice that comes with standards-based solutions.

For a closer look at the Usage Models, or to join this large network of IT leaders and solutions providers, I encourage you to attend the upcoming series of ODCA webcasts.  For the presentation schedule, visit the opendatacenteralliance.org site. If you would like to hear more of my thoughts on this announcement, listen to my podcast at: http://intel.ly/lE1rae

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.