HP, Intel, Yahoo Team on Cloud Testbed

HP, Intel Corp. and Yahoo have created a global, multi-data center test bed for cloud computing research and development, the companies said today. The initiative is designed to provide researchers with access to an open source cloud platform for honing their development skills. The new platform will compete with a similar cloud testbed introduced by Google and IBM.

Both efforts are designed to provide researchers and universities with easy access to a cloud platform on which they can develop the skills required to write and support the cloud applications of the future.

The three tech giants are partnering with three universities - the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany - along with the National Science Foundation.

The testbed will initially consist of six “centers of excellence,” each hosting a cloud computing infrastructure running on HP hardware and between 1,000 to 4,000 Intel processor cores. The six centers - housed at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo - will be fully operational later this year.

Intel Considering Portable Data Centers

It’s been more than a year since Sun Microsystems (JAVAD) announced Project Blackbox, its container-based “data center in a box.” We’ve been closely tracking developments with portable data centers, including the subsequent product announcements from Rackable (RACK). The concept has generated much interest and discussion, but deployment has thus far been limited to a Blackbox at Stanford and three ICE Cube customer shipments by Rackable.

This week there’s evidence that one of the tech sector’s biggest names is thinking portable. In a recent issue of its Premier IT magazine (via John Rath), Intel indicated that it is taking a serious look at deploying portable data centers in shipping containers. Here’s a summary from Martin Menard, the director of Intel’s Platform Capability Group:

The cost of building a new data center is extremely high

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Intel: How to Tackle A Major Consolidation

Planning and logistics are critical to the success of a major data consolidation. And consolidation projects don’t get much bigger than the one currently underway at Intel (INTC), which is consolidating 133 data centers worldwide into just eight high-density facilities.

The process is driven by challenges in power and cooling in legacy data centers. More than 60 percent of Intel’s data centers are at least 10 years old, with designs that make it difficult to capture the benefits of virtualization and energy-saving technologies. The consolidation process will take eight years to complete, and will overhaul many aspects of Intel’s infrastructure.

“The transition is pretty major for all our business units,” said Uttam Shetty, the Director of Data Center Efficiency at Intel. “All of the businesses (at Intel) have been open to these changes. It took a quarter or so to align the rest of the corporation, and there are some technical challenges within the design process. What we have done is show the benefits as we go to various business units.”

Intel’s task is made somewhat easier by the fact that it has space in existing facilities for the new data center space, so there’s no new construction required. When the consolidation is completed, Intel will have added about 300,000 square feet of new space in those eight sites, which will be strategically located in the US, Europe and Asia. Intel is not identifying the location of their new facilities. It has existing state-of-the-art data centers in Oregon and New Mexico.