Last month, Diane Bryant announced the creation of the Cloud for All Initiative, an effort to drive the creation of 10’s of thousands of new clouds across enterprise and provider data centers and deliver the efficiency and agility of hyperscale to the masses. This initiative took another major step forward today with the announcement of an investment and technology collaboration with Mirantis. This collaboration extends Intel’s existing engagement with Mirantis with a single goal in mind: delivery of OpenStack fully optimized for the enterprise to spur broad adoption.
We hear a lot about OpenStack being ready for the enterprise, and in many cases OpenStack has provided incredible value to clouds running in enterprise data centers today. However, when talking to the IT managers who have led these deployment efforts, a few key topics arise: it’s too complex, its features don’t easily support traditional enterprise applications, and it took some time to optimize for deployment. While IT organizations have benefitted from the added effort of deployment, the industry can do better. This is why Intel is working with Mirantis to tune OpenStack for feature optimization, and while this work extends from network infrastructure optimization to storage tuning and beyond, there are a few common themes of the work.
The first focus is on increasing stack resiliency for traditional enterprise application orchestration. Why is this important? While enterprises have begun to deploy cloud native applications within their environments, business is still very much run on what we call “traditional” applications, those that were written without the notion that some day they would exist in a cloud. These traditional applications require increased level of reliability, uptime during rolling software upgrades and maintenance, and control of underlying infrastructure across compute, storage and network.
The second focus is on increasing stack performance through full optimization of Intel Architecture. Working closely with Mirantis will ensure that OpenStack will be fully tuned to take advantage of platform telemetry and platform technologies such as Intel VT and Cloud Integrity Technology to deliver improved performance and security capabilities.
The final focus is on improving full data center resource pool optimization with improvements targeted specifically at software defined storage and network resource pool integration. We’ll work to ensure that applications have full control of all the resources required while ensuring efficient resource utilization.
The fruits of the collaboration will be integrated into Mirantis’ distribution as well as offered as upstream contributions for the benefit of the entire community. We also expect to utilize the OpenStack Innovation Center recently announced by Intel and Rackspace to test these features at scale to ensure that data centers of any size can benefit from this work. Our ultimate goal is delivery of a choice of optimized solutions to the marketplace for use by enterprise and providers, and you can expect frequent updates on the progress from the Intel team as we move forward with this collaboration.
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