Microsoft joins Open Data Center Alliance

Microsoft has joined the Open Data Center Alliance, a user-led organization that aims to simplify the purchasing of data center and cloud services by promoting interoperability and common standards. The alliance has gathered over 300 members in its two-and-a-half years of existence. Most of them are users of data center and cloud services: Banks and telcos dominate, but others include a U.S. university, a French car manufacturer and the Dutch national police agency. Vendors are welcome to join too, either as solution provider members or, like Microsoft, as contributor members, a status that allows them to see early drafts of the organization's publications and to contribute to the technical workgroups that write them. Those publications include "usage models" defining standard terminology to aid in the writing of requests for proposals. The usage models cover areas including service orchestration, secure federation, long-distance workload migration and interoperability across clouds. There is also a tool to help write RFPs. The Proposal Engine Assistant Tool (PEAT) can generate ODCA-recommended verbiage calling for open, standards-based solutions to a variety of requirements. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here