Intel Pushes Open Data Center Alliance

Intel is cheerleading a new alliance of 70 IT customers (with a net spending of $ 50 Billion), vendors and others to develop a vendor agnostic usage roadmap. The new body is called Open Data Center Alliance aims to define how datacenters of the future are to be built. Whether this will define the future of datacenters or it is just another press release is something we have to wait and see. Clearly, Intel is positioning itself to become THE PLAYER in the future datacenters and by forming the alliance with the help of IT customers, it is aiming to empower them to decide on the future datacenters.

Ok, let us start with the basics

Open Data Center Alliance is a consortium of IT leaders, service providers and others who are set out to develop a roadmap that comprises of 19 prioritized usage models that will address the technical requirements needed for future datacenters and cloud infrastructure. The idea is to build the infrastructure by easily sourcing the necessary solutions from multiple vendors so that the datacenters of the future are open and interoperate with one another.

The basic goal of this alliance is to identify the technical requirements of datacenters with focus on

Security
Efficiency
Simplification

The Open Data Center Alliance has three levels of membership: Steering Committee, Contributor and Adopter membership. Adopter-level membership in the Alliance is available to anyone who is building cloud or data center infrastructure and is unencumbered by vendor interests. Alliance members have the opportunity to review and comment on the Usage Model Roadmap prior to public distribution, and have access to members-only events and Alliance membership networking opportunities. The Alliance also plans to drive extensive vendor engagement to ensure that Alliance Roadmap and usage model requirements reflect the full scope of industry capability. The steering committee of this alliance consists of BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Shell, Terremark, and UBS. Intel plays a role of technical advisor and other vendors allowed only at the working group level and not at the top decision making levels. This is done so that there is some legitimacy to the alliance.

What else is there in today’s announcement?

Along with the announcement about establishment of ODCA, the alliance has also released Ver 0.9 of Usage Model Roadmap. This roadmap

defines usage model requirements to fulfill the cloud infrastructure needs of the future
features 19 prioritized Usage Models which provide detailed requirements for cloud solutions, and include documentation discussing the requirements for technology deployments
is vendor-agnostic and serves as the foundation for Alliance members in their planning of future data center deployments

The version 1.0 of the Roadmap is scheduled to be released in Q1 of 2011.

Quick thoughts

Let me add my quick thoughts on this new alliance and leave the detailed analysis for the future (as and when it gains more steam)

My main concern is that it shouldn’t turn out to be yet another alliance announced by big companies that went nowhere
The fact that it heavily involves the customer side of the equation means that it augers well for the future
Cloud leaders like Google and Amazon are missing from the list of vendors supporting the alliance. This makes me wonder if it will bomb like the Open Cloud Manifesto efforts from some of the industry players
What does it mean for AMD? Derrick Harris clearly identifies the issue and asks why Intel didn’t try to bring in their competitors into the fold
Though I like the ideals, I do have some lingering doubts about how far this alliance will go without some of the major players in the industry

Conclusion

Please note that the above thoughts of mine are just the initial thoughts after reading the announcement once. I will be closely following this group and will report back as and when I see some positive movement on their efforts. Having said that such an effort is really crucial for the industry.