IDF: Open Data Center Alliance extends drive for cloud standards

The Intel-backed Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has announced a series of partnerships and project rollouts designed to improve standards for enterprise datacentre platforms.

The group has formed a partnership with the Open Compute Project (OCP) to collaborate on increased efficiency, and establish open standards for the development of datacentre platforms.

The deal will allow OCDA members to work with the OCP to provide input and evaluation for future standards.

Marvin Wheeler, chairman of the ODCA board of directors, told V3 that the group's members, which include major IT service providers, system vendors, large enterprises and financial institutions, are looking to develop standards for public and private cloud datacentre adoption.

"These also are the types of companies that, when they make their decision, it is a needle move. Any one of those can be one of the largest cloud users out there," he said.

"You have people saying they are ready to go to the cloud, but to push their chips in and adopt it in a massive form, these are the things we need."

The ODCA has enlisted the help of several hardware partner members to develop systems and proof-of-concept models.

Wheeler noted that areas such as big data, cloud services, federating data and quality of service remain to be addressed.

"You can not even envision sending petabytes of storage out to some database without having some of these preliminary things worked out," he said.

"You do not want to get held hostage with a giant database out there if you have not crossed the hurdle of how I can access it when I want to."