By now you’ve heard from a LOT of us on building a cloud. You have probably heard us talk about performance, efficiency, and trust. But have you ever seen it done? If not, you should take a look at this new video: Intel® Cloud Builders Reference Architecture VMware vCloud™ Director Demo.

In this how-to video, our Cloud Builders team built a mini data center and then deployed an actual cloud environment within it.

While the host of the demo is an animated character, the configuration example is entirely real. Using actual screen captures and configuration samples, this video walks you thought the process of creating a cloud based on VMware vSphere™, VMware vCloud Director™, VMware vShield™ manager, and Intel^® Xeon^® processor-based hardware.

Featured hardware components include:

• 4 Urbanna 2U 3.5 HDD Xeon DP Servers with CPU: Xeon DP Nehalem-EP X5570 FC-LG8 2.93 GHz
  
• 1 Timber Creek 2U Xeon DP Storage Server with CPU: Xeon DP Westmere-EP X5680 FC-LGA8 3.33GHz
  

Along the way, we captured lots of technical tips and tricks that you’ll find useful if you put our reference architecture into action—as we did in the video. Even if you’re just thinking about deploying a cloud, this video will provide valuable insights into the configuration process.

So, what’s your excuse now?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to engage with cloud computing service providers, industry analysts, a few enterprise customers and other cloud computing thought leaders at GigaOM’s Structure.  The event was a golden opportunity to get a snapshot of the cloud computing industry. Here's a few “cloudy” themes that emerged from the event:

• Cloud service providers aren’t basing their entire portfolio on selling services based on a multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure. In fact, it seems like most of the smaller cloud providers specialized in variations of helping enterprise IT with the management of their private cloud (such as managing various aspects of data center real estate, or if outside the enterprise firewall, managing the enterprise’s cloud on a single-tenant environment). While you do hear cases of enterprises using multi-tenant public cloud (such as CRM with salesforce.com), it seems that many cloud providers are essentially helping enterprise IT be more efficient with their own private cloud.
  

• Many of these cloud providers face challenges similar to IT@Intel's private cloud challenges. During the event, Das Kamhout, our lead architect of the Intel IT cloud, led a session and addressed the challenge of Intel becoming an IT service provider for its many business units. Afterwards, many service providers commented on the fact that they face similar challenges as Intel IT’s challenges. A few facts and figures that he mentioned include:
  
  • In 2010, Intel IT more than tripled its rate of virtualization in the Office and Enterprise environment from 12% to 42% and is on track to achieve its goal of 75%.
    
  • Intel IT reduced the time to provision new infrastructure services to 3 hours from 90 days by implementing an On Demand Self Service portal as part of its enterprise private cloud.
    
  • Intel IT learned how to predict future capacity for their IAAS and PAAS services by analyzing the ratio of compute resources that end-users asked for versus what they actually consumed.
    
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• Are we nearing an age where trusted computing for the cloud starts with the hardware? Perhaps one of the more interesting keynotes at the event was given by Simon Crosby, formerly CTO at Citrix and now start-up entrepreneur at Bromium.  One of his topics was how the majority of enterprise attacks occur via compromised enterprise clients. From the Intel point of view, what was particularly interesting was his discussion about how his start-up will potentially be using “hardware assist” technology, such as Intel TXT, that enhances virtualization on client devices to offer continuous endpoint protection.  For those who aren’t up to speed on Intel TXT - learn more from the video below (and note that many of the same principles in the data center with Intel TXT can also apply to Intel TXT on the enterprise client).
  
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• The cloud still needs transparency. At the event, Jason Waxman, Intel’s GM of High-Density Computing, engaged in a fireside keynote chat with Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent. One of the more interesting topics was how there is still a lack of transparency with the cloud around a bevy of important features and metrics, such as monitoring cost or security. In order for the industry to solve these problems, Jason Waxman talked about how the Open Data Center Alliance is spelling out requirements for cloud computing service providers so that users will be able to select and access service offerings based on standard, industry-accepted definitions ( To learn more, my colleague, Raejeanne Skillern, has an interesting article here on the importance of ODCA.) One potential output could be that there will eventually be different tiers of security that service providers can design to (such as bronze, silver and gold security tiers) that end-users could specify when buying cloud services. To see this fireside chat with the two Jasons, please go here.
  

• There are still many cloud services that haven’t been invented yet. For instance, Jason Waxman, in this video interview from Structure, brings up the idea of searching through videos, as an obvious new use model that could be useful for end-users. As server compute increases with Moore’s law, expect new breakthroughs like video search to become available with cloud providers.
  

• SSDs are a "no-brainer" for cloud infrastructures. One last trend at the event was the discussion around the performance and operational cost benefits of SSDs vs traditional hard drive disks. Many cloud service providers at the event talked about how it was a no-brainer to deploy SSDs in their infrastructure, even given the higher up-front costs for SSDs. In the video below (taken while at Structure) – I provided a little flavor about this emerging trend:
  

Thanks for reading. Comments or questions encouraged.

Justin Van Buren

Intel Marketing

Twitter: @jlvb2006