If people were starting to get worried that Intel didn’t have a concise cloud plan then they can stop fretting after the company revealed its latest chips and cloud partnerships.
The chip giant just expanded its Xeon line with new models that are designed to boost computing performance. Although chip upgrades are expected, extra effort has been made to increase its influence over the cloud market.
The latest chips pack more circuitry on each piece of silicon and include up to 22 calculating engines on each chip, this is up from a maximum of 18 on previous models.
In addition this improvement the chips have built-in features that allow it to encrypt data more quickly than previous models.
Collaborations with CoreOS will see the two working together to deploy OpenStack with the start-ups Kubernetes containers into a single open source software-defined infrastructure stack; the idea being that this will help firms to get their public and private clouds up and running more quickly.
Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS said "By running OpenStack on Kubernetes, you get the benefits of consistent deployments of OpenStack with containers together with the robust application lifecycle management of Kubernetes."
In addition to the partnership with CoreOS, Intel is also working with Mirantis with the same idea of simplifying choices for cloud operators in order to accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions.
Intel’s collaborations don’t end there as the company is also working with VMware to produce centres of excellence around the world that will build reference patters for cloud deployments. Supported by the National Institute of Standard and Technology, these centres will have a particular emphasis on cyber security.
By working on the issues of ease of adoption and cyber security, Intel is hoping to help more companies move to the cloud, which is likely to help Intel out if they choose to use its servers.
Further work is being done in the cloud by Intel with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to test out cloud apps. The two will work together to set up 1,000 server nodes so that developers can run apps for test before deployment. Again, this is moving cloud users to deploy on Intel’s servers and chips.
A final piece of work is being done in the cloud which will see it expand its Cloud Builders program by adding a storage functions. Currently over 300 firms have signed up to the program and share information on best practise.
The company said at an event in San Francisco that it was expecting increased growth in the cloud industry, with investors spending $17.5bn into cloud start-ups in the last five years.
Jason Waxman, GM, Intel Cloud Platforms, said: "The market is really hoping this is going to pay out, but it’s not going to happen on its own.
"We have to get the industry aligned and a big part of that comes down to standards. Andy Grove used to talk about the virtuous cycle and that was about standards – if you created a standard and got the industry behind it and got momentum then it became a de facto standard."
It would seem that Intel is quite keen for developers and cloud vendors to standardise their offerings to some extent around what the chip manufacturer is doing, which it will undoubtedly hope will boost its sales.
