Like fog, the Cloud has so far been conceived of as a kind of black box concept with no visibility into the technologies – essentially servers – used to power it. This relative opacity is about to change. At least that’s Intel’s objective with its Cloud Technology Program, which will start to be deployed this year in partnership with major CSPs (Cloud Services Providers) such as Amazon Web Services.

This initiative is primarily aimed at promoting the “Powered by Intel Cloud Technology” seal, thus allowing the customer to make an informed choice of the type of leased hardware. The benefit claimed by Intel is typical from a marketing standpoint, which is that of a hardware environment presented as optimal. “Just like choosing a car, the engine behind the Cloud service has an impact on performance and efficiency” says Jason Waxman, VP of the Data Center Group and General Manager of the Cloud Platform Group at Intel.

But since the manufacturer’s technology portfolio is no longer lim-ited to processors, CSPs participating in this program will also have to provide detailed information on the type of CPU (with or without an accelerator), storage, software, and networking capabilities. This will probably bring a certain number of performance- and security-related solutions out of the shadows, such as Intel Turbo Boost Technology, Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), Intel Data Pro-tection Technology with Advanced Encryption Standard New In-structions (AES-NI), and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT), to name a few.