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Staying on the Ball: Intel and Data Centre Technologies

Intel’s APAC Cloud Summit in Bangkok highlighted the challenges that the data centre (DC) industry will face in trying to scale up to meet demand for computing power, storage efficiency and network bandwidth.

 

Around this time 2 years ago, the chip maker had already begun to put concerted effort into addressing these challenges, last year consolidating the Intel Datacentre and Connected Systems Group or DCSG which looks after processor, networking and storage systems groups, as well as also announcing the new Xeon E5 just last March.

 

DC Trends

In Bangkok, Jason Fedder, general manager for DCSG in APAC and PRC as well as RK Hiremane, regional product marketing for the DCSG in APAC, both presented industry trends that emphasised how serious Intel is about continuing to play not just a vital role, but a bigger role in the data centre space.

 

Fedder: The data centre space is a major revenue generator for Intel

 

Hiremane emphasised that IT must be able to scale and how Intel could help address network bottlenecks, scalable performance, power efficiency, security, interoperability and data storage efficiency as well as faster access to it.

 

For example he noted there is more and more adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networks. “More than 40-percent of the network is 10 GbE and of late, innovation in terms of what the network does, innovation like fibre channels that can carry regular network traffic and also storage traffic… it is easier to consolidate these traffic into one pipe.”

 

Fedder pointed out how new workloads and expectations are seeing significant growth in data centre investments worldwide and shared that data centre profit margins for Intel are stable and strong. “It is a major revenue generator.”

 

Emerging workloads, emerging tech

Spending on storage has already begun to overtake spending for overall IT and last July, Intel seized opportunity to move into the storage space in a big way by acquiring Whamcloud, an open source clustered file system (Lustre) developer, which would give the chip maker a strong foothold in the HPC space.

 

That isn’t all the moves that Intel has made on HPC. They acquired the high-speed-low-latency networking Infiniband technology earlier this year, and introduced a new family of HPC-focused and multi-integrated core (MIC) processors in June, called Xeon Phi.

 

There are over 100 Intel product SKUs covering the breadth of different segments like SMBs, mission-critical, enterprise, high-powered computing (HPC), cloud, network and even storage, with revenue expected to hit UD$20 billion in the next five years.

 

HPC is becoming increasingly mainstream with over 20% growth but micro servers are also gaining more attention from Intel’s ecosystem of partners and ODMs. Specifically for ODMs like Quanta, together with Intel they introduced a high-density micro server last June which claims to be able to provide advanced power efficiency and system cooling.  

 

Fedder noted that these new micro server entrants like Quanta target very specific customers like Facebook and that take up is more active with greenfield operators instead of established enterprises looking to refresh their data centres. He said, “Some industries will take advantage of micro servers readily,” and named media, Big Data workloads and surveillance as few examples.

 

Keep in view

One of the more interesting slides that Fedder presented was entitled “Network Transformation: Consolidation of 4 workloads onto 1 architecture.”  It was basically a graphic of how Intel technologies were responsible for application, control, packet processing and signal processing workloads. By 2012, packet processing functions would start to be delivered (if not already) by Intel products, with signal processing products from Intel, in the pipeline.

 

More is expected to be revealed at the upcoming San Francisco IDF, and especially about an initiative loosely termed the ‘open networking platform.’ Intel has already showcased products that support software-defined networking (SDN) equipment and its leading protocol OpenFlow. OpenFlow-enabled equipment allows a vendor-neutral way of managing networks, a feature which is very useful for virtual machine mobility, next-gen IP-based mobile networks and more.

 

Final

Fedder concluded, “We are continuing to invest to address additional demand, you have seen some investments in terms of acquisitions we made around erasure codes, Lustre file storage-based file systems… and there will be more of that.

 

“And it is our intention to stay ahead of this investment curve and make sure we continue to establish and maintain Xeon as the base of all these different workloads.”

 

*Enterprise IT News was in Bangkok as a guest journalist to Intel’s APAC Cloud Summit 2012 

 

More Intel APAC Cloud Summit coverage:

 

* Intel IT’s US$9 Million Savings Journey 

 




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