What is Happening? — This week (15 – 18 Oct.), the OpenStack Summit is being held in San Diego, CA. Saugatuck believes this event, which combines sessions for developers, users, and administrators of OpenStack Cloud software, points out that the fundamental benefits of Open Source software can bring value to many aspects of IT including the underlying infrastructure of private and public Clouds.

However, Saugatuck believes that most efforts of the OpenStack group, as well as other Cloud-oriented “open” groups like CloudStack, The Open Group, and even the Open Grid Forum, will deliver limited benefit to enterprise Cloud users, mainly because these efforts tend to miss a core enterprise user Cloud need for openness and standardization: The ability to migrate and utilize workloads in Clouds, between Clouds, and between Clouds and on-premises IT (i.e., hybridized environments). Without this, such groups, while doing great work, are not developing / delivering Interoperability for users, as much as they are defining, developing and delivering new products. 

On 24 February Intel formally released Thunderbolt, previously codenamed LightPeak, a new data transfer interface that uses the mini DisplayPort connector and touted as “the fastest way to get data in and out of your PC and peripheral devices.”  The new interface makes its debut in Apple’s new MacBook Pro, which Intel says will be the first among many major consumer brands rolling out support in the coming months.  Notably absent from the press release was any mention of how Thunderbolt could be applied to servers and data intensive workloads in corporate datacenters. Saugatuck sees Thunderbolt technology as possibly, if not likely, useful and adaptable to data centers, with some caveats.

In current data centers Fiber and 10Gb Ethernet offer nearly competitive transfer rates to Thunderbolt, but with more serious limitations, such as fragile cabling and expensive additional hardware needed to interface fiber with existing servers.  But because Thunderbolt is essentially a PCI Express layer cable, which provides benefits for adding peripherals directly onto motherboards it could provide a more cost effective connection to existing SANs.  It could reduce future expenditure by allowing servers to bypass other layers of hardware while maintaining performance for large data transfers.