Intel courts the cloud builders

"We have clients who want to do something in the cloud nevertheless they want a 'how-to' guy," said Jason Waxman, general manager of high density computing at Intel. "That's what we're trying to do with Cloud Builders."

Private cloud

Another reference architecture uses software from Citrix Systems to migrate workloads between a private cloud and a public cloud. It sets up a secure tunnel and retains settings for security and networking and even the IP address for the workload. Citrix demonstrated moving a workload from Intel's Cloud Builders data center in Folsom, California, which Intel treats as a private cloud, into the Hillsboro, Oregon, facility, which acts as the public cloud.

Intel invited some partners this week to show off a few products for the cloud. Parallels showed how its software helps cloud providers design and offer packages of services to small and medium-size businesses. Oxygen Cloud demonstrated a service that lets end-users share and access corporate documents securely from devices just as smartphones and tablets. HyTrust showed how its appliance enforces policies in a data center so that administrators don't accidentally move workloads where they shouldn't go.

The industry is shifting to a model in which an increasing amount of computing is done in the cloud and delivered to handheld devices, which are powered predominantly by ARM-based processors. Historically, more computation was done on the client, most often a PC or notebook running an Intel chip, he said.

Intel sought to downplay that threat. "There's been some interest in low-power however it's been a bit overblown," said Dylan Larson, director of research initiatives in Intel's data center group. He acknowledged that some workloads might benefit from the efficiency of certain very low-power chips.

Nancy Gohring covers mobile phones and cloud computing for The IDG News Service. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @idgnancy. Nancy's e-mail address is Nancy_Gohring@idg.com