By 2012, Intel predicts that some 20-25% of its server chips will be dedicated toward data centres that power Cloud Computing.
“We expect to see, by 2012, a substantial portion of the server market will be running some version of Cloud Computing,” said Jason Waxman, general manager of high-density computing for the Intel Server Platforms Group. “Right now, as much as 14% of server purchases are going into some sort of cloud deployment.”
“The Cloud has promise, but we’re trying to be pragmatic,” he said. “With small to medium-sized businesses, companies are asking, ‘Do I need lots of infrastructure, or can I do software as service?’ And the enterprise is cautious. They’re thinking that now’s the time to start the evaluation and path to it, as opposed to just jumping in.”
But isn't Intel itself just jumping on the Cloud bandwagon? "We're probably the least well known cloud computing company out there, who has been involved with all these different deployments," Waxman said. "We've learned a lot over the last year and now we want to use what we've learned with technologies and services to help companies lower their total cost of ownership.
"In tough economic times, companies want to cut costs by leveraging technologies and services,” he added. “With a Cloud data centre, you get so much scale that the cost of labour becomes much smaller. And what you're left with is that about 50% of the total cost of ownership is the cost of the compute infrastructure - server and storage - and about another 25 per cent is the cost of power."
Waxman sees Intel's role as being honest broker between the other Cloud champions, such as Amazon and Google. "Our role is we get to be a partner to all of the big companies, as opposed to competing with them,” he said. “None of them view us as a competitor, they view us as an enabler.
"This includes the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsofts, but also telcos doing hosting like AT&T and Verizon and smaller Web 2.0 companies like Facebook. These are companies that are purchasing thousands of machines a month and putting them into data centers in the mega-watt range."
