Intel paints a target on OpenStack flaws

The company showcased new technologies at the most recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, such as Clear Linux, a lightweight operating system optimised for running containers in a cloud environment.

As a part of the initiative, Intel announced its partnership with Rackspace to set up the OpenStack Innovation Center to focus on driving enterprise features and scale optimizations into the OpenStack source code. Under this initiative, Intel will develop public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions in a way that they are relatively easier to implement. He added that Rackspace doesn’t “create proprietary OpenStack distributions”, and as such, the innovation center’s offerings would be available to consumers without charge.

“Most people look at the market and say “The cloud is on fire”, Jason Waxman, head of Intel’s cloud infrastructure group, told reporters Thursday. The center’s ultimate goal is to accelerate the development of enterprise capabilities and significantly add to the number of developers contributing to upstream OpenStack code.

To speed its growth, Intel has kicked off a multi-pronged effort, called the Cloud for All initiative, that includes hiring hundreds of additional engineers to work on open-source cloud software, setting up two massive compute clusters where companies can test and validate applications, and making further investments and acquisitions itself.

OpenStack adoption by telcos and cloud service providers is further along than enterprise OpenStack adoption, and Rackspace operates the biggest OpenStack cloud of them all.

OpenStack, which this week celebrated its fifth anniversary, was founded by a few engineers from Rackspace and NASA but has since swelled to more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors globally. The initiative’s goal is to enable enterprise clouds that scale to thousands of nodes.

Intel said the OpenStack Innovation Center in association with Rackspace will include the world’s largest OpenStack developer cloud consisting of two 1,000-node clusters.

Diane Bryant, SVP & GM, Data Center Group, Intel, said: “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”.

The problem, as Intel sees it, is that choosing and deploying the software to build a cloud is too complex for most companies to handle. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

But with a name like “Cloud for All”, Intel is promising potential corporate customers with near out-of-the-box cloud deployment options based on open source and industry standards that could be adapted to organizations of all sizes. There’s also growing interest in Xeon Phi processors for high-performance computing in the cloud, he said.