A new industry group has set up with a proposal to rebuild the Internet.
The Open Grid Alliance wants to create standards and agreements for distributed data center resources supporting Edge applications. It's been launched by Edge data center player Vapor IO and enterprise software company VMware, and also includes Dell Technologies, DriveNets, MobiledgeX, and PacketFabric.
Industry collaboration needed for new edge 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, and a veteran of previous industry groups including the Open Compute Project and OpenStack.
The Open Grid Alliance says it will work on the economics of delivering services from the cloud through the network edge and to end-users. It has produced a Manifesto [Google Drive share] but has yet to publish its work program, goals, or roadmap. The announcement promises working groups that will "present ideas, facilitate discussions, and offer suggestions". The group also promises to gather an educational resource and knowledge hub for technologies and innovations, defining principles and identifying interoperable technologies.
"The Open Grid needs an organizing body that encourages collaboration and shares learnings. This organization must be vendor-neutral, as the Open Grid is too big, too complex, and too important for any single company to own." says the Manifesto. "The Open Grid Alliance (OGA) seeks to be this organization."
“We’ve never built something of this scale, and it will require bridging of disparate technologies with multiple levels of abstraction," said Kaniz Mahdi, vice president of advanced technologies, VMware. "This will only be possible with a deeper level of collaboration across wireless, cloud, and networking industries.”
“The shape of the internet has been the greatest predictor of value creation in our digital economy,” said Vish Nandlall, vice president, technology strategy and ecosystems for Dell Technologies.
Hear more from Kaniz Mahdi of VMware and Cole Crawford of Vapor IO at 10am EDT April 15
