Category Archives: Intel

Intel, Internet of Things, Linux, M2M, News & Analysis, Open Source, Wind River

Wind River announces upgraded IoT software platform

internet of things farmingEmbedded tech vendor Wind River has announced an upgraded portfolio of IoT software development tools for the internet of things (IoT).

The wholly-owned Intel subsidiary made the announcement at the Embedded Linux Conference in Dublin this week, and claimed to bring added flexibility and interoperability to its open-source platform, Wind River Linux 8. It also says it’s thrown in improved user experience and scalability for addressing IoT, stating that a combination of its virtualization services also allows customers to begin developing apps for IoT platforms within minutes of set-up and installation.

Speaking on the development of the upgraded platform, which will underpin a number of Wind River’s existing technology profiles, general manager of OS platforms Dinyar Dastoor is proud of the work the firm’s doing in driving the development of IoT.

“Wind River Linux allows customers to extract vast amounts of business intelligence and value from their data, and supports devices of all sizes, architectures and industries – from general purpose and high-performing real-time devices to carrier grade, virtualization, and highly secure military applications,” he said. “With the latest version of Wind River Linux and our updated Open Virtualization profile, we are delivering a versatile and robust Linux offering to the market that is ideally suited for the development if IoT devices.”

Wind River’s Linux platform is born out of the Linux Foundation’s Yocto Project, a hardware-agnostic an open-source collaboration project designed to provide templates, tools and methodologies for implementing tailored Linux systems on any embedded product – hypothetically ideal for IoT products, software and infrastructures. Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, is looking forward to the company’s continued participation with the project, based on its extensive contribution thus far – Wind River has so far contributed more than one third of the lines of code used by Yocto.

“Wind River continues to do important work with the Linux community, as well as foster open-source innovation,” he said. “We look forward to the company’s ongoing contributions to the Yocto Project, and their market success with products like Wind River Linux.”

Visit Europe’s leading IoT event – Internet of Things World Europe – in Berlin on 5 – 7 October 2015

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Intel, BlueData partner on big data following $20m funding round

Intel and BlueData are collaborating on big data

Intel and BlueData are collaborating on big data

Hadoop specialist BlueData announced a strategic collaboration with Intel this week after the chip company’s venture capital arm helped lead a $20m funding round for the startup.

BlueData offers a virtualised Hadoop-as-a-Service  software for on-premise infrastructure that speeds up Hadoop cluster deployment and model prototyping. The company also has some IP that The partnership will see the two companies integrate BlueData’s big data software with Intel’s Xeon processor technology, which Intel said builds on its existing big data integration initiatives with Cloudera and Apache Hadoop.

“Intel architecture provides a high-performance, secure, robust foundation for big data analytics,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel chief executive. “BlueData’s innovative software delivers the simplicity, agility and efficiency of big data-as-a-service in an on-premises model. Together, we are focused on bringing big data into the mainstream and unlocking the value for our enterprise customers.”

Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and chief executive of BlueData  said: “This strategic collaboration with Intel will help advance BlueData’s mission of making it easy to deploy big data infrastructure. Our software platform simplifies the complexity, reduces the cost and delivers faster time to value for big data initiatives.”

“Our go-to-market relationship and joint product development with Intel will allow enterprises to accelerate their deployment of Hadoop and Spark, and deliver on the promise of big data analytics,” he added.

The move comes as Intel Captial, the chip giant’s venture capital arm, led a $20m series C funding round for BlueData along with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, and Ignition Partners.

As part of the funding round Doug Fisher, senior vice president of Intel and general manager of its Software and Services Group, will join BlueData’s board of directors.

The BlueData partnership is one of a number of high-profile big data deals Intel has inked as of late. Less than a week ago the firm partnered with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) to develop a big data platform that can help diagnose and treat individuals for cancer based on their genetic pre-dispositions.

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Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has secured $100m in new funding this week in a round led by Intel Capital, with the companies also announcing deepened collaboration in the cloud arena.

The latest round, which comes less than a year after Mirantis secured $100m in series B funds from investors, also included participation from new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said the cash will be used to bolster its partnerships with vendors and other organisations innovating with OpenStack.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Mirantis’ goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions,” said Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis.

“Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 per cent committed to only OpenStack,” Freedland said.

At the same time, Intel and Mirantis announced the two companies would deepen their partnership and work together on Intel’s Clouds for All initiative, a series of partnerships with ISVs announced earlier this summer which are intended to accelerate cloud interoperability and boost deployments.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds,” Bryant said.

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AWS goes hipster, plans pop-up shop in London

AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC

AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC

Amazon Web Services has announced plans to take its AWS Pop-up Loft programme to London in early September in a bid to reach out to local UK startups.

The temporary shops will be a place where developers, engineers and entrepreneurs can come to learn about AWS services, get trained up on the company’ services, meet clients, and receive guidance on cloud migration.

The company has opened similar pop-up shops in in San Francisco and New York City, but the most recently announced shop, which is due to open September 10, is the company’s first crack at it outside the US.

The UK is a hotbed of innovation and London is one of the main places where we see talented, ambitious entrepreneurs coming together to test ideas and start new businesses that leverage cloud computing,” said Werner Vogels, chief technical officer and vice president, Amazon.com.

“With the AWS Pop-up Loft in London we will be bringing together a host of AWS resources, and some of the brightest and most creative minds in the industry, to help startups across the UK. We look forward to working alongside the next generation of UK businesses and helping them to reach their full potential,” Vogels said.

Intel and Chef will also be supporting the pop-up shop.

Patrick Bliemer, managing director, Intel Northern Europe said: “The startup community is a fundamental driver of technology innovations fuelling the rapid growth of the digital services economy. Intel is excited to be working closely with AWS on the AWS Pop-up Loft program to help enable environments around the world where users have access to the tools and expert guidance they need to bring new ideas and innovations to market.”

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Intel partners with OHSU in using cloud, big data to cure cancer

Intel is working with the OHSU to develop a secure, federate cloud service for healthcare practitioners treating cancer

Intel is working with the OHSU to develop a secure, federate cloud service for healthcare practitioners treating cancer

Intel is testing a cloud-based platform as a service in conjunction with the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) that can help diagnose and treat individuals for cancer based on their genetic pre-dispositions.

The organisations want to develop a cloud service that can be used by healthcare practitioners to soak up a range of data including genetic information, data about a patient’s environment and lifestyle to deliver tailored cancer treatment plans quickly to those in need.

“The Collaborative Cancer Cloud is a precision medicine analytics platform that allows institutions to securely share patient genomic, imaging and clinical data for potentially lifesaving discoveries. It will enable large amounts of data from sites all around the world to be analyzed in a distributed way, while preserving the privacy and security of that patient data at each site,” explained Eric Dishman director of proactive health research at Intel.

“The end goal is to empower researchers and doctors to help patients receive a diagnosis based on their genome and potentially arm clinicians with the data needed for a targeted treatment plan. By 2020, we envision this happening in 24 hours — All in One Day. The focus is to help cancer centres worldwide—and eventually centers for other diseases—securely share their private clinical and research data with one another to generate larger datasets to benefit research and inform the specific treatment of their individual patients.”

Initially, Intel and the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) will launch the Collaborative Cancer Cloud, but the organisations expect two more institutions will be on board by 2016.

From there, Intel said, the organisations hope to federate the cloud service with other healthcare service providers, and open it up for use to treat other diseases like Alzheimer’s.

“In the same timeframe, we also intend to deliver open source code contributions to ensure the broadest developer base possible is working on delivering interoperable solutions. Open sourcing this code will drive both interoperability across different clouds, and allow analytics across a broader set of data – resulting in better insights for personalized care,” Dishman said.

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Alibaba to set up cloud datacentre, HQ in Singapore

Alibaba is adding a datacentre in Singapore, where it will also place its international HQ

Alibaba is adding a datacentre in Singapore, where it will also place its international HQ

Alibaba’s cloud computing division Aliyun revealed plans to set up a datacentre in Singapore, where it also plans to base its overseas business headquarters.

The Singapore datacentre, its seventh globally, will host the company’s growing suite of cloud services and link up with its existing datacentres in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Silicon Valley.

“The cloud datacentre in Singapore is a key milestone in our strategy to help businesses of all sizes innovate and scale, wherever they are based, and however they choose to grow,” said Sicheng Yu, vice president of Aliyun. “Aliyun offers a unique combination of services for success in the cloud, including high-volume cloud-based transaction support and quality assurance for cloud computing services.”

Singapore will also be home to the company’s international headquarters, where its global business outside of China will be managed.

Aliyun claims demand for its cloud services is growing at a whopping 82 per cent, with revenues from its cloud services more than doubling year on year. The company said it has over 1.8 million cloud customers as of June this year.

Last month Aliyun’s parent Alibaba announced plans to plough $1bn into its cloud computing division, which cloud give it the scale it needs to compete more effectively with the likes of Amazon and Google. In addition to the Singapore datacentre, which is scheduled to go live in September this year, the company also plans to add cloud datacentres in the Middle East, Japan, and in various countries in Europe as part of that investment.

At the time the company said it also plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships through its recently announced Marketplace Alliance Program, a move that sees it partnering with large tech and datacentre operators, initially including Intel, Singtel, Meeras, Equinix and PCCW among others to help localise its cloud computing services and grow its ecosystem.

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Quanta intros Intel RSA Open Compute proof of concept

Quanta is mashing up Intel's RSA and Open Compute designs

Quanta is mashing up Intel’s RSA and Open Compute designs

Taiwanese datacentre vendor Quanta has introduced an Intel Rack Scale Architecture (Intel RSA) proof of concept rack solution based on Open Compute specifications which the company is pitching at hyperscale datacentre operators and cloud providers.

Intel RSA is the chip vendor’s own modular architecture design that disaggregates compute, storage and networking and weaves them together in a fabric it claims makes resources easier to pool and pod.

Now Quanta has developed a proof of concept for a server that blends Intel’s RSA specs and Open Compute designs.

The hardware vendor, which already offers hardware based on Open Compute designs, claims will significantly reduce datacentre energy consumption and costs, reduce vendor lock-in and ease management and maintenance.

“Datacentres face significant challenges to efficiency, flexibility and agility,” said Mike Yang, general manager of QCT. “Working with Intel on the Intel RSA program, we have developed our product lineup based on Open Compute to give customers the utmost in efficiency and performance, supported by open standards.”

“In addition, we provide manageability from the chassis level and rack level, up to pod level, so customers can easily pool resources across these levels to support dynamic workloads,” Yang said.

ODMs like Quanta have gained strong share in the hyperscale datacentre space because of their cost competitiveness, and at the same time the Open Compute project, an open source hardware project founded by Facebook a few years back, seems to be gaining favour among large cloud providers. Facebook, IBM, HP and Rackspace are among some of the larger providers building out Open Compute-based services at reasonable scale.

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Intel, Wipro join IoT, M2M trade body to boost deployments

Intel and Wipro are joining the IMC

Intel and Wipro are joining the IMC

Intel and Wipro have this week joined the International M2M Council (IMC), a global trade association set up to represent Internet of Things vendors and service providers and boost volume IoT deployments.

The trade body, which does advocates on behalf of IoT vendors and service providers, claims to have over 10,000 members and is on track to grow by another 5,000 by the year’s end. In addition to Intel and Wipro companies on the IMC board of governors include Aeris, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Digi International, Inmarsat, Iridium, KORE, Nighthawk Controls, Numerex, ORBCOMM, Synapse Wireless, Telecom Italia, Telit, Verizon, and Wyless.

“The IMC’s focus on business results suits our role as a provider of end-to-end IoT solutions very well,” said Vijay Anand V.R., practice director, IoT Business, Wipro Digital, who has also joined the IMC Board

“This trade group also has a truly global footprint that fits our business model and aspirations.”

Rose Schooler, vice president of the IoT Strategy Office at Intel, who also sits on the IMC board of governors said: “The IMC is an industry-leading professional organisation that is reaching out to adopters of IoT technology on a broad scale. The organisation is gaining an average of 275 new members per week – members that are developing, buying, and deploying IoT solutions. Clearly, there is a demand in the market to learn more.”

Both Intel and Wipro have accelerated their IoT efforts over the past few months. Earlier this year enterprise vendor Software AG and outsourcing giant Wipro teamed up to offer a platform for streaming analytics generated by Internet of Things sensors and devices.

Intel has also ramped up its collaborations in the space, teaming with Fujitsu in May this year to develop Internet of Things solutions for manufacturing, retail and public sector clients.

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Alibaba takes aim at AWS, Google, Microsoft, pours $1bn into global cloud rollout

Alibaba is pouring $1bn into its cloud division to support global expansion

Alibaba is pouring $1bn into its cloud division to support global expansion

Alibaba announced plans this week to plough $1bn into its cloud computing division, Aliyun, in a bid to expand the company’s presence and establish new datacentres internationally. The move may give it the scale it needs to compete more effectively with the likes of Amazon and Google.

The company currently operates five datacentre in China and Hong Kong, and earlier this year set up a datacentre in Silicon Valley aimed at local startups and Chinese multinational corporations.

The $1bn in additional investment will go towards setting up new cloud datacentres in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and in various countries across Europe.

“Aliyun has become a world-class cloud computing service platform that is the market leader in China, bearing the fruits of our investment over the past six years. As the physical and digital are becoming increasingly integrated, Aliyun will serve as an essential engine in this new economy,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group.

“This additional US$ 1 billion investment is just the beginning; our hope is for Aliyun to continually empower customers and partners with new capabilities, and help companies upgrade their basic infrastructure. We want to enable businesses to connect directly with consumers and drive productivity using data. Ultimately, our goal is to help businesses successfully transition from an era of information technology to data technology,” Zhang said.

The company said it also plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships through its recently announced Marketplace Alliance Program, a move that sees it partnering with large tech and datacentre operators, initially including Intel, Singtel, Meeras, Equinix and PCCW among others to help localise its cloud computing services and grow its ecosystem.

The investment if anything confirms Alibaba’s intent to grow well beyond Asia and displace other large public cloud providers like AWS, IBM and Google, which already boast significant global scale.

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Rackspace, Intel to coordinate ‘world’s largest OpenStack dev team’

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world's largest OpenStack development team

Intel and Rackspace claim the centre will house the world’s largest OpenStack development team

Rackspace and Intel are teaming up to launch an OpenStack Innovation Centre aimed at bolstering upstream development of the cloud platform.

The centre, housed at Rackspace’s corporate HQ in San Antonio, Texas, will bring together technical specialists from Rackspace and Intel to co-develop new features and functions for OpenStack and fix bugs in the code base, with the fruits of their efforts being contributed back upstream.

The companies will also offer OpenStack training to engineers and developers; they claim the centre will house the world’s largest dedicated OpenStack development team.

“We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world’s leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace.

“We don’t create proprietary OpenStack distributions.  Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Centre’s contributions will be made available freely, to everyone,” Crenshaw said.

Jason Waxman, vice president of the Cloud Platforms Group at Intel said: “This announcement demonstrates our continued support and commitment to open source projects. Our ongoing collaboration with Rackspace and the OpenStack community represents an ideal opportunity to accelerate the enterprise appeal of OpenStack.”

OpenStack, which this week celebrated its fifth anniversary, was founded by a few engineers from Rackspace and NASA but has since swelled to more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors globally. While the open source cloud platform is young, it has matured significantly during its brief existence and has become a defacto cloud standard embraced by many if not most of the big IT incumbents.

“The community’s goal is to foster collaboration and spur innovation that drives broad adoption,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “The depth of experience and community engagement that Rackspace and Intel offer makes this an exciting project, as the code contributions and large-scale testing will benefit everyone who uses OpenStack.”