When Intel announced its Hybrid Cloud platform in July, cloudcomputing.info published an article to clarify if it’s really a cloud computing technology or not:
The Intel Hybrid Cloud is a physical server (a Lenovo ThinkServer TS200v or a white label machine that meets the hardware requirements) that Managed Service Providers (MSP) can buy and deploy at a customer’s site.
MSPs remotely control the server out-of-band by leveraging the Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) 6.0, part of the vPro technology.Inside the server there’s Microsoft Hyper-V, ready to serve a number of pre-configured and pre-deployed virtual machines, including Windows Server and Small Business Server (SBS) 2008, firewall, backup, disaster recovery, VoIP PBX and other software platforms. Additional applications provided by Intel partners will be published through a software catalog. The MSPs will be able to preinstall their own applications inside the server to differentiate the offering.
Now that the first prototypes are being sent to the customers, there’s an interesting change: the underlying hypervisor powering Hybrid Cloud is not Hyper-V but Citrix XenServer.
A video showing the unboxing of a unit provides the necessary evidence:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6sQeDGb31w[/youtube]
Inquired about the difference, Intel confirms:
Hyper-v is on the roadmap. POC & Pilot are based on XenServer as of now.
The change raises a few questions. The most obvious one is why Hyper-V is not used as originally announced by the company. But there are a couple even more interesting:
- Did Intel acquire Neocleus to cut any dependency from 3rd party vendors and be able to develop a hypervisor that is uniquely tailored for Hybrid Cloud?
- Did Intel acquire McAfee to integrate its security solutions in Hybrid Cloud and offer out-of-the-box security to the targeted enterprise and SMB customers?