ACADEMIA

Teaming to build and enable the next-generation cloud architecture

The Cloud Advisory Council, an innovative not-for-profit organization dedicated to develop and enable the next-generation cloud architecture, today announced the organization’s formation and directive to provide cloud designers and IT managers with the tools needed to enable computing in the cloud, to strengthen the qualification and integration of cloud solutions and to provide best practices.

The Cloud Advisory Council is an industry collaboration of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), strategic technology suppliers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and end-users across the entire range of the Cloud market segment. Founding members include: AMAX, AMD, Atlantic.Net, Check Point Software, Colfax, DDN, Eucalyptus, Mellanox Technologies, Nanjing Standard Communication, Nimbula, ProfitBricks, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro, and Xeround.

Through this organization, new cloud architectures will be researched, defined and specified as a basis for next-generation cloud infrastructures. The council main objectives are:

• Definition of the next generation of cloud architecture
• Providing open specification for cloud infrastructures
• Publications of best practices for optimizing cloud efficiency and utilization
• Enable ease-of-use with comprehensive cloud management and tools

“The Cloud Advisory Council has been established by industry leaders to develop a cloud specification and best practices for building the most efficient cloud infrastructures. This is critical for vendors as well as for the cloud users,” said Eli Karpilovski, chairman of the Cloud Advisory Council. “The Cloud Advisory Council will assist and provide resources for industry and community organizations to better leverage their infrastructure and improve productivity and efficiency.”

“AMAX shares the vision of the Cloud Advisory Council and is dedicated to developing the next generation of cloud architectures in an effort to strengthen the qualification and integration of cloud solutions and give cloud architects and IT managers the tools they need to enable computing in the cloud,” said Jean Shih, President of AMAX. “Our 30 years of award-winning x86 engineering and manufacturing expertise, along with our open architecture approach, affords us maximum flexibility to establish best practices & reference architectures for designing, building and deploying high-quality, cost-effective cloud infrastructures.”

“We are delighted to participate in the Cloud Advisory Council’s research activities,” said Terri Hall, Corporate VP Alliances and Solution, AMD. “AMD has a comprehensive energy efficient cloud portfolio that provides world class scaling of enterprise applications. We are very well aligned with the goals of the council to address emerging cloud and virtualization workloads effectively and efficiently.”

“The Cloud Advisory Council represents the best technology vendors and we are excited to be a part of the future. With our twenty years of industry experience being a service provider, this forum will enable us to work closer with leading technology hardware vendors to define the next generation of cloud, “ said Marty Puranik, President of Atlantic.Net, Inc. (http://www.atlantic.net). “Being a leading cloud hosting provider, we have already developed one of the fastest cloud platforms on the market. Now, working with this elite group of hardware vendors will provide collaborative opportunities to further enhance and strengthen our massively scalable and industrial grade cloud infrastructure.”

“For over 13 years DDN has been a leader in storage performance, density and efficiency in the most content intensive storage environments. That is why we are proud to be a founding member of the Cloud Advisory Council and join in its mission that so closely aligns with ours, extending into cloud storage,” said Jeff Denworth, VP of Marketing for DDN. “Our Web Object Scaler product is the ideal cloud storage platform designed for today and tomorrow’s web scale demands and will make a great contribution to the specifications and best practices for building efficient cloud infrastructure.”

“Mellanox, as a founding member of the Cloud Advisory Council, is dedicated to develop and collaborate with industry leaders in developing next generation cloud architectures. Together, we share the vision of a simplified and a higher efficient cloud infrastructure that will deliver the best return-on-investment for cloud providers and users,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox’s end-to-end 10/40GbE and FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand cloud interconnect solutions have been proven to provide the best interconnect technology to enable cloud deployments of tomorrow.

“ProfitBricks is a second generation Cloud Computing IaaS provider. Our vision, formed in 2009, of an IaaS 2.0 platform was launched in 2012 and now we look forward to sharing and learning from other progressive technology providers in the Cloud Advisory Council,” said Conrad Wood, Deputy CTO, Head of Infrastructure at ProfitBricks. “Businesses of all sizes are replacing physical data centers with virtual ones, and it’s key that all of us in the industry deliver on the promise of performance, flexibility, reliability and data security in the cloud.”

“SGI is proud to be a founding member of the Cloud Advisory Council,” said Bill Mannel, VP of Product Marketing, SGI. “We welcome the opportunity to apply our leadership and expertise in public cloud solutions to private cloud challenges. SGI has been powering public and government cloud deployments in traditional and mobile datacenter environments, leading the market in design-to-order capabilities, innovative cooling and management software.”

“Cloud computing is the future of IT. The foundation of the Cloud Advisory Council will accelerate the development of cloud computing, which will benefit the end users and the whole industry. Sugon is glad to be a founding member and work together with other industry leaders,” said Shao Zongyou, vice president of R&D at Sugon. “Sugon is dedicated to provide the best technologies and products to our customers. Our leading cloud infrastructures have been adopted by many city cloud computing centers in China. Cloud is the key in our R&D roadmap.”

“Xeround is excited to be joining the Cloud Advisory Council and take an active role in designing the future of database solutions and data services for the cloud era,” said Razi Sharir, CEO of Xeround. “Xeround’s unique native cloud database technology, distributed architecture, and our extensive experience delivering a zero-management database-as-a-service solution to thousands of cloud users – all put us at a unique vantage point to lead the way we transform data management in the cloud.”

The Cloud Advisory Council recognizes also the importance of establishing metrics for Cloud sustainability and performance. For this reason, the Cloud Advisory Council will propose the use of a new metrics, Cloud Center Efficiency (CCE) and Power Consumption Efficiency (PCE), to address inefficient utilizations associated with cloud centers. The impact of efficient usage is emerging as extremely important in the design, location, and operation of current and future cloud centers.

Become a Member of the Cloud Advisory Council Today:

Help influence the direction of the Cloud by becoming a member of the Cloud Advisory Council. Membership to the Council is free. More information can be found on our website: www.cloudadvisorycouncil.com.

Visit the Cloud Advisory Council at VMworld San Francisco (August 26-29, 2012):

During VMworld, visit us at our member booths: AMD (Booth #801) and Mellanox Technologies (Booth #2029) for more information about the Cloud Advisory Council, its activities, and membership information.