A new industry group called the Open Grid Alliance (OGA) announced its plans “to evolve the Internet to be a global, shared platform that distributes compute, data, and intelligence to when and where it’s needed, on demand.
OGA, which counts Dell Technologies, DriveNets, MobiledgeX, PacketFabric, Vapor IO and VMware as founding members, will pursue an “edge-in” vision for the Internet.
“The Internet was built from the core out. Now we need to rebuild it from the edge in,” said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of edge infrastructure company Vapor IO. “The alliance will accelerate a decades-long journey of innovation at all levels of the stack, from fiber optics to workload automation. We want to align thought leaders, technologies and investments to bring forth applications that simply cannot be delivered on the Internet we have today. The Open Grid is for everybody; it will only emerge from deep industry collaborations, and that’s why we formed the Open Grid Alliance.”
As part of its charter, the OGA will embrace technologies that distribute the economics and flexibility of the cloud through the network edge all the way to end users, making it possible to build new classes of applications that support billions of intelligent devices, the data that they generate, and the new networking infrastructure that underpins their seamless operation.
The OGA will define key principles for the Open Grid and identify interoperable technologies that adhere to those principles. It will document how these technologies will impact cloud providers, developers, vendors, communication service providers (CSPs), internet service providers (ISPs), and end users. The OGA will promote collaboration and open architectures that will enable the dynamic geo-distribution of workloads.
“As human experiences evolve from basic content consumption to real-time immersive collaboration, we see the Internet evolving toward a compute grid and eventually, an intelligence grid. This evolution will enable highly-interactive intelligence applications to be distributed around the globe, on demand,” said Kaniz Mahdi, vice president of advanced technologies, VMware. “We’ve never built something of this scale, and it will require bridging of disparate technologies with multiple levels of abstraction. This will only be possible with a deeper level of collaboration across wireless, cloud, and networking industries.”
“The business of the internet has been the greatest predictor of value creation in our digital economy and created a whole new way of doing business. It removed geographic barriers and changed the way we connect,” said Vish Nandlall, vice president, Technology Strategy and Ecosystems for Dell Technologies.
“New immersive technologies, interactive applications, and industry 4.0 solutions present a new challenge to the way applications meet subscribers in infinite locations. It requires network functions to be distributed across the connectivity grid at a high elasticity and scale,” said Ido Susan, CEO of DriveNets.
“A true Open Grid will enable consistency and predictability across multiple clouds and mobile telecom networks with the highest quality of performance. This will make it possible to build next-generation applications and services that leverage the wireless cellular network infrastructure,” said Jason Hoffman, CEO of MobiledgeX. “Telecommunications providers require applications that can scale globally and dynamically across highly distributed networks and infrastructure. The Open Grid Alliance is starting one of the most important industry conversations.”
“We believe connectivity should be democratized and automated,” said Dave Ward, CEO of PacketFabric. “An Open Grid will incorporate the latest in network automation to deliver applications where and when they’re needed. The ability to provision network routes on demand will play a critical role. We’re proud to support the Open Grid Alliance in its efforts to bring together multiple industries to architect the most affordable infrastructure that connects users and devices to clouds and private network interconnections.”
http://www.opengridalliance.org
