Intel is here with its very own off-the-shelf blockchain packages. The chip giant has unveiled commercial-grade blockchains, in a bid to take on Microsoft and IBM in this space.
The two companies are currently said to be in the lead, with Microsoft in a distant second place compared to IBM in the highly dynamic world of blockchains. But now, Intel has expanded its blockchain offering even further by making it easier for businesses to get into blockchain the game.
This, it hopes will help it carve out a bigger slice of the pie.
You can gather more details from the marketing material (PDF file) that the chip maker published earlier this month. But basically, the computer hardware and infrastructure manufacturer has launched what is called the Intel Select Solution for Blockchain: Hyperledger Fabric.
Think of this as sort of a commercial-grade off-the-shelf option, as this doesn’t change Hyperledger, the Intel blockchain software.
Instead, this is a set of readymade packages of hardware and software infrastructure that the company plans to sell directly to businesses.
They are built, unsurprisingly, on Intel hardware. You have devices like the Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform into the mix, solid-state hard drives and Ethernet network adaptors that are all properly packaged to help organization get their blockchain off the ground.
As quickly, as possible.
As of right now, only one configuration is available — Base Configuration. This is basically the bare minimum selection of hardware that Intel recommends for running its Hyperledger Fabric software.
And what do you get here?
The system has two Xeon processors with 10 cores apiece, 96GB memory, a 24GB SSD boot drive, to go with 1TB of data storage, and 10Gbps networking. The company does claim that this hardware is scalable, which in this case refers to the upgradeability of the server.
Not unusual for enterprise solutions, in particular the Hyperledger Fabric based solutions that only need to be scaled when they can no longer keep up with resource demand.
With so much corporate interest in blockchain, there is a ton of money to be made by offering solutions that are quick and simple to deploy, easy to understand, and futureproof. Surprisingly, this is something on a few companies offer.
With this, Intel certainly seems to be going for this market.
