It’s no secret that enterprise technology and corporate reliance on critical systems is growing exponentially. Data centers need to scale just as fast, exposing the need for open standards.

It’s no secret that enterprise technology and corporate reliance on critical systems is growing exponentially. Data centers need to scale just as fast to keep up with demand, service times, and security, while meeting increasing expectations with regard to speed and capability.

We discussed how geographic infrastructure is boosted by open standards a few weeks ago. In a more recent article for ZDNet,  Ram Lakshminarayanan points to Intel’s leadership in forming the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) in 2010, which now boasts over 300 member organizations.  Lakshminarayanan points to this as recognition of the critical role open standards are playing in maintaining interoperability in data center optimization:

“[The] ODCA hopes to simplify the selection of cloud services and data centre solutions by creating a set of standard user-based models and reference designs. These usage models cover a broad range of topics , including infrastructure, security, commercial, carbon, compliance, management and services, data, and portability.”

Some of the recent rise in industry cloud adoption may be an indication that “scaling cloud infrastructure to meet business needs is simpler when employing open standards.” When major players, like Intel, advocate for and develop open standards, the action generates more positive and enthusiastic development from others. According to Lakshminarayanan, this is true in data center optimization as well as other core technologies:

“…embracing software-defined infrastructure concepts for storage and networking will help create the building blocks necessary to deliver standards-based solutions. Intel’s Infrastructure Builders program provides detailed reference architectures for building proven, interoperable cloud solutions, while the company’s Cloud Finder portal helps businesses identify and evaluate cloud service providers supporting the open standard vision.”

With support from industry leaders like Intel, open standards are helping to deliver better and more interoperable systems to make business infrastructure more scalable, secure, and efficient.