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Cloud Computing: $50 Billion For Open Data Centers
Data centers should be simple, efficient and open. With that as a goal, the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) was formed in October by 70 different companies. While Intel has been the principle promoter of the group, potential cloud consumers appear to be the main power behind the organization. These big customers want cloud standards that can promote interoperability and which can be sourced by multiple vendors.
Members of the alliance include giant corporations like BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Shell, Terremark, and UBS. These companies have some of the largest corporate IT infrastructures in the world. In fact, the aggregate buying power of the organization members is $50 billion — at least that is the total that these companies are currently investing in their IT operations. This is a clear sign that cloud computing has the attention of large companies.
Intel, in the role of principle non-voting technical advisor, is in the position of being able to promote a technology that is likely to require voracious amounts of computer processors, like those of Intel’s, to power the cloud server farms of the future. Although BMW IT chief Mario Muller, an alliance steering ccommittee member, said that the goal of the group is to be vendor-agnostic.
The alliance is further broken up into five different working groups targeting specific interests that include:
- Security
- Infrastructure
- Management
- Services
- Government and Ecosystem
The group has also created a 0.5 “vendor-agnostic” Usage Model Roadmap that they hope to refine and vote on before the end of Q1 2011. The roadmap lays out various reference architecture and is meant to serve as a guide for selecting services and vendors. While Intel is the organizer of bringing the alliance together, it is also clear that the steering committee, absent of any IT vendor, is in charge of the direction. It’s highly unusual that this kind of a vendor-neutral group with such high-profile members could have been organized. Perhaps the organization of the group itself is an end-product of technologies like Social Media and Collaboration.
