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Intel Corp. announced new chips targeting cloud computing as well as partnerships to address concerns of companies that have stayed on the sidelines of that technology trend.

The Silicon Valley giant, whose chips power the vast majority of server systems, on Thursday expanded its Xeon line with new models that boost computing performance. Intel executives, at an event in San Francisco, also pointed to built-in features that could boost the security of cloud computing jobs.

Intel also announced a collaboration with two startups, CoreOS and Mirantis Inc., could make it easier for companies to move computing jobs between competing cloud services, or between their own data centers and the cloud.

"Any business is going to use multiple clouds," said Diane Bryant, the Intel senior vice president who heads Intel's data-center group. "The concern is, 'please don't lock me in.' "

The Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker has benefited from the immense numbers of servers purchased by cloud services like those of Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. But it also wants to spur innovation at smaller cloud providers and the many other companies trying to equip their own data centers with cloudlike technology.

Intel's efforts to promote cloud computing focus on two open source programs. One is OpenStack, which acts as a kind of dashboard to control resources in a data center. It comes in commercial versions from companies including Mirantis as well as free, open-source versions.

The other is called containers, software wrappers for small programs that can work together. CoreOS distributes a program called Kubernetes—originally an internal project of Google that the company gave away under an open-source license—that simplifies the task of managing large numbers of containers.

Intel's alliance with CoreOS and Mirantis is intended to let companies more easily use both technologies without maintaining a separate cluster of computers for each, Ms. Bryant said. Merging aspects of Kubernetes and OpenStack would make it easier for companies to move computing chores between multiple cloud providers and their own data centers, she and other industry executives said.

Many companies will appreciate the freedom created by the new alliance, "unless you think that Amazon is the one true cloud," said Chad Arimura, chief executive of Iron.io, a San Francisco startup offering related software tools.

To help companies worried about other technical issues arising from cloud computing, Intel and VMware Inc., a vendor of data-center software, said they would jointly establish "centers of excellence." These facilities would help customers test cloud techniques without buying new technology or moving jobs to cloud service vendors.

Intel's new chips exploit its latest production recipe to pack more circuitry on each piece of silicon. The new Xeon E5-2600 v4 family, as its called, includes up to 22 calculating engines on each chip, up from a maximum of 18 on prior models.

The Xeons also have built-in features that can encrypt data more quickly than prior models, for security purposes, and include a new feature to maximize the use of built-in memory circuitry for the most important tasks. The chips will be used by new servers from companies that include Dell Inc., HP Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.

In addition to the chips, Intel said it introduced faster data storage devices, called solid-state drives, or SSDs, that use NAND flash memory chips produced as part of a partnership with Micron Technology Inc. The SSDs are Intel's first to contain chips based on a technology called 3-D NAND, which boosts storage capacity by using many layers of circuitry rather than squeezing the size of transistors.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 31, 2016 18:55 ET (22:55 GMT)

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