Telefonica Digital and Intel pilot their hybrid cloud

The first phase of a joint innovative research programme between Telefónica Digital, Intel Labs and the Intel Architecture Group has been completed, demonstrating technologies that will allow large corporations and SMEs to seamlessly migrate computing workloads from their local data centre to a third-party public cloud. The partners say this solution shows the concept of a hybrid cloud service.

 

Important applications, or parts of applications, can remain in enterprises’ internal data centres, whilst as much of their applications and IT capacity can be moved externally. This flexibility should allow enterprises to meet temporary spikes in demand for business continuity, and to optimise their own data centre use and capacity.

With this approach, there should be no portability or interoperability issues between the two separate environments.

 

According to Moisés Navarro, Cloud Global Director for Telefónica Digital, this latest project is an extension of the operator’s existing cloud strategy for its business customers:

 

“Innovations like 'GoToCloud' or 'Real Elastic Cloud', developed by Telefónica, show our clear commitment on taking care of our clients' needs as well as providing value to the cloud service model. From the Telefónica Digital perspective, the hybrid cloud will contribute to the data-centre operator’s ‘Go to Cloud’ strategy that aims to boost the migration of corporate applications to the cloud, as an evolution of its virtual data centre cloud product.”

 

The joint pilot has demonstrated what the partners say is “the cloud-bursting exchange” from a local private cloud (represented in the pilot scheme by Intel’s Cloud Builder facility) to the public cloud (represented in this case by Telefónica’s Virtual Data Centre public cloud service).

 

Jim Blakley, Intel Architecture Systems Integration Division Director at Intel, added that Cloud resource provisioning across the hybrid cloud was achieved under the OpenStack framework, proving the feasibility of distributing workloads from private to public clouds on top of this open source platform:

 

“This capability brings a previously unavailable level of transparency and federation between cloud consumers and Cloud providers, helping preserve the service policies across cloud boundaries down to the hardware platform level. Cloud consumers will have an easier time assessing service quality and SLA compliance.  Cloud providers will be able to offer differentiated cloud services even when their offering is part of a larger service.”

 

The next phase of activities are planned to illustrate the enforcement of infrastructure management policies across cloud service boundaries.