Intel was a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project and recently increased its membership to Platinum, the highest tier. We had a conversation with Uri Elzur, Intel’s director of SDN architecture, to understand what drove the company’s decision and what we can expect to see from them in 2015 and beyond.
Intel has been a member of the OpenDaylight Project since its inception. What’s behind the decision to raise your investment in OpenDaylight?
Uri Elzur: At Intel, we have been outlining our vision for Software Defined Infrastructure or SDI over the last couple of months. This vision is taking a new approach to developing data center infrastructure to make it more agile so it works in a more automatic fashion to better meet the requirements that shape the data centers of tomorrow. Some of us fondly call the force shaping it ‘cloudification’.
SDI is uniquely meeting customer needs at both the top and the bottom line. Top line refers to greater agility and speed to develop data center-scale applications, which in turn allows accelerated revenue generation across a larger number of our customers as well as the introduction of new, cloud-centric business models. At the same time, SDI also uniquely allows for the reduction of total cost of ownership for both service providers and their end user customers. Service providers are under intense competitive pressure to reduce cost, be it the cost of a unit of compute or, at a higher level, cost for a unit of application where an application includes compute, network and storage.
