Intel and Google Cloud join forces to accelerate hybrid cloud development

On April 2, 2019, Intel launched a data-centric portfolio designed to help customers get more value from data. In the keynote speech at the April 2 conference, Navin Shenoy, Intel's executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, showed the wafers used to manufacture Intel Xeon processors.

Recently, Intel and Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership to help enterprise customers achieve seamless application deployment between local and public cloud environments. The two companies will work together to develop a new service platform reference design Anthos based on the second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor. The reference design is an optimized Kubernetes software stack that provides greater workload portability for customers who want to take advantage of a hybrid cloud environment. Intel will design this service platform production environment as an Intel Select Solution and will also provide a related solution platform for developers.

Although many enterprises are adopting multi-cloud solutions to drive business development, many companies still find it difficult to find the right hybrid cloud solution to enable seamless migration of workloads between clouds. The new Anthos reference design will address this challenge with a stack optimized for workload portability, supporting application deployment across enterprise on-premises data centers and multiple public cloud providers.

“Google and Intel have a long-standing partnership to bring infrastructure innovation to customers,” said Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure at Google Cloud. “Today’s data center environments are increasingly complex, and hardware and software infrastructure cannot take a ‘one size fits all’ approach. We have worked deeply with Intel to leverage their technology and product innovations to deliver Anthos solutions that enable customers to run their applications in a way that works best for them.”

“The infrastructure we are collaborating with Google and the software optimizations needed to power its hybrid and multi-cloud solutions are a perfect fit with Intel’s vision for data-centric computing,” said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We are providing customers with an Intel-based foundation to help them better leverage the benefits of their data, which requires an architecture that can span multiple operating environments. This collaboration will provide customers with a choice of optimized solutions that can be used on-premises or in public cloud environments.”

This collaboration is an extension of the technology alliance between the two companies, which has led to collaboration on workloads in high-growth areas such as infrastructure optimization, artificial intelligence, and the integration of new technologies such as 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory on Google Cloud Platform.

The new reference design will be available in mid-2019, with OEMs and solution integrators expected to make the solution available to the market later this year.