Data Backup Digest

While Intel has been working side-by-side with the professionals at Rackspace for quite some time now, their relationship has certainly grown after their recent announcement of their “Cloud for All” initiative. Intel and Rackspace hope that their new program will help to drive cloud adoption by enterprises and companies of all sizes. Moreover, the partnership will also see the opening of a brand new development center meant solely for Rackspace’s own OpenStack cloud architecture.

OpenStack, which was introduced through collaboration with NASA in 2010, offers a free and open-source platform that is similar to that of an infrastructure-as-a-service program. One of the fastest-growing open source communities in existence, OpenStack already boasts more than 500 memberships and nearly 30,000 developer-contributors across the globe. Their upcoming development center, which will be housed in their current corporate headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, will be known as the OpenStack Innovation Center. Once it has been completed, the OpenStack Innovation Center will create hundreds of jobs in the San Antonio area.

Christian Foster, director of marketing with Rackspace’s OpenStack Private Cloud group, explained his company’s future goals. He was quoted as saying: “We expect to add hundreds of new developers over the next year or two. Our goal is to accelerate the development of new enterprise features and increase adoption of the open cloud network to the benefit of the entire OpenStack community.”

Jason Waxman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Cloud Platforms Group, spoke excitedly about their continued relationship with the team at Rackspace. He was quoted as saying: “This announcement demonstrates our continued support and commitment to open source projects. Our ongoing collaboration with Rackspace and the OpenStack community represents an ideal opportunity to accelerate the enterprise appeal of OpenStack.”

In order to drive cloud adoption, Intel and Rackspace will be teaming up on a number of other initiatives. The OpenStack Work Group will be used to help identify and resolve software bugs as well as to aide in the development of brand new functionality, and the team is already working on the creation of two servers, each with 1,000-node clusters, to fulfill their vast testing needs. One of the clusters will be located at one of Rackspace’s Dallas data centers while the other cluster, which will be maintained by Intel, will be stored at a location that has yet to be determined. Developer training, which will be delivered via courseware modules, is expected to increase the number of OpenStack developers.

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group with Intel, spoke about the need for increased cloud adoption and the importance of the “Cloud for All” campaign by saying: “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. We believe that through this initiative we will enable our customers to realize the benefits and innovations gained from the latest cloud computing technologies.”