Intel, Eucalyptus and Canonical join forces to help user build cloud infrastructures confidently

A few weeks ago myself and Dustin Kirkland had the privilege of travelling to the Intel facility in Hillsboro, Oregon to work with Billy Cox, Rekha Raghu, Paul Guermonprez, Trevor Cooper and Kamal Natesan of Intel and Dan Nurmi and Neil Soman of Eucalyptus Systems and a few others on developing a proof of concept whitepaper on the use of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Intel Xeon processors (Nehalem).

The whitepaper is published today on the Intel site (registration required) so it seems like a good time to talk about why we collaborated.

The Intel Cloud Builder program is intended to develop some best practice information for businesses and institutions looking to take advantage of the promise of cloud computing. As we do consistently with UEC, we are being specific when we talk about cloud as the ability to build Infrastructure as a Service behind a corporate firewall – that is on your own systems, protected by your own security protocols.

In Portland we had access to some great hardware and as an ex-Intel man, it was good to mess directly with the metal again. Intel defined a number of use and test cases and the guys from Intel, Eucalyptus and myself were able to have some fun putting UEC through its paces. And the results were good. We documented them and the whitepaper gives numerous code and scenario examples to help anyone new to cloud to get up to speed really quickly and the make the most of the capabilities of the Xeon processor in supporting an internal IaaS infrastructure. You can find out how to get started on UEC with existing documentation. but this whitepaper takes it to the next stage.

Being able to test the software as part of the Intel Cloud Builder program and jointly publish this whitepaper is a great endorsement of what is still a young technology. And I hope it will give users confidence to start building their own UEC deployment on x86 technology.

Nick Barcet, Ubuntu Server Product Manager