Telefónica and Intel launch joint hybrid cloud pilot

Telefonica and Intel have completed the first phase of their joint pilot project seeking to accelerate the adoption of hybrid clouds.

The main objective of both companies was to overcome barriers when moving data between on-premise enterprise servers and applications and public cloud services. The idea behind the project was to demonstrate the seamless and dynamic exchange of resources between public clouds and private infrastructure, while keeping important applications (or parts of applications) running internally.

Cloud consumers will have an easier time assessing service quality and SLA compliance.

The joint pilot demonstrated the cloud-bursting exchange from a local private cloud (played by the Intel Cloud Builder facility) to the public cloud (played by the Telefnica Virtual Data Centre public cloud service). Cloud resource provisioning across the hybrid cloud was achieved using the OpenStack framework, proving the feasibility of distributing workloads from private to public clouds on top of this open source platform.

The service offers a full range of IT capabilities that can be quickly provisioned, manageable, secure and flexible. This flexibility, claimed both companies, allows enterprises to meet temporary spikes in demand for business continuity, and to optimise data centre usage and capacity.

"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," said Jim Blakley, director of architecture systems integration at Intel.

"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 this pilot project, which will use Intel Trusted Execution technology, Intel Node Manager and Intel Data Center Manager, aims to demonstrate the reliability of infrastructure management policies between different systems clouds.