Jason Waxman of Intel delivers a Thursday morning session
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The final morning presentation in the main forum Thursday was delivered by Jason Waxman of Intel.
He says his group – the data center group – was created a few years ago to figure out how Intel could help hosting and data center providers.
He says he sees a few keys to service provider success, which fall into two basic categories, value added services, and efficiency added through technology.
He shows some analyst forecasts for colo and dedicated services, XaaS and “cloud services,” each greater than the last. But he says they’re underestimating the potential for hosting providers
Waxman thinks there’s a huge opportunity, for instance, in personal web space.
Within the next five years, he says, a billion new users will be online, along with 15 billion new devices and a huge amount of new Internet traffic But along with new users, there will also be new services.
There’s a whole new class of new uses, he says, that are going to create huge opportunities, including those personal spaces he mentioned. Smartphone users are going to want to create and share content, and they’re going to be looking for customizable ways to do that.
He also sees a big opportunity in multi media creation tools hosted in a centralized place.
Another big opportunity in gaming. Gaming creators are going to want to access capacity with minimal upfront investment, but to scale quickly if their work takes off.
Intel has a vision for the cloud in 2015.
The key elements of that vision include federation, enabling data to be shared across public and private clouds; automation, enabling IT to focus less on management and more on innovation; and client awareness, in which service providers are going to need detailed information on their clients.
Bringing that vision back to your operations, he says your customers have certain expectations. They want the illusion of infinite capacity. They want security. They want it to be self-service. And they want it to be always accessible.
Hosting providers, generally, don’t want to use cost as a means of differentiating. But they can differentiate cloud services with scalable performance, security and reliability and quality of service. There’s a good opportunity for hosts to pick one or more vectors on which they differentiate their cloud service.
We’ve probably all seen the studies that show security is the number one customer concern regarding cloud is security. And Waxman says Intel is working to help hosting providers make their clouds secure.
He described functions Intel has created for Isolation of virtual machines, hardware support for encryption, and for federation via a single sign-on for multiple cloud platforms.
Intel also feels that vendor lock-in has returned as a top concern for cloud customers, which has created a real opportunity for cloud providers to work together as a group to grow the overall cloud business, rather than competing for share of the same thing.
There are already collaborative efforts in the works to create standards, in the data center space, software, infrastructure and environmental groups.
From there he moved on to the efficiency piece of the presentation, emphasizing the need for efficiency, flexibility and ease of deployment.
Regarding efficiency, he says Intel has been looking hard at optimization, tailoring technology to specific workloads and automate facility operations.
He suggests that by modernizing infrastructure, you can reduce server cap-ex by 15 times (based on a 5000 server deployment). Automating operations can lower op-ex and cut server deployment time by 50 percent. And using modern data center design can create excellent power usage effectiveness.
Intel is seeing new workloads emerging around high performance computing, which hosting providers may be looking at providing services for. Intel is building chips for that.
Another new workload is the very lightweight workload. And Intel thinks a new class of hardware is required for that.
For those workloads, he says, Intel is expanding its microserver line of products, building out the low-power end of the processor spectrum. The goal of which is to provide flexibility and choice for customers in hosting environments.
He brought up one of the new Dell Power Edge microserver configurations to demonstrate the chips at work in a product designed for the hosting environment
Digging into efficiency, he talked about Intel’s Node Manager, which helps to increase power efficiency. He says work to make networking more lightweight can drive further efficiency.
Waxman also discussed Intel’s Cloud Builders poject, which provides reference architectures for a big selection of usage cases.
Wrapping up, he says the cloud space is a $150 billion market in the next few years – a huge opportunity for hosts, who have chances to differentiate themselves, and the cloud builders program is designed to help with that.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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