Intel and Data Centers : Flexibility, Ease of Management, Services

Intel looks to the future of the datacenter and does so with the intent to change the underlying architecture to build an ultra-modern data center. Intel wants to redefine the architecture of the data center. This is what emerged from the Intel Datacenter Day conference to introduce the company’s new strategy. The vision underpinning the technological efforts of the group is built around the elements of reliability and flexibility, to which is added the desire to offer a highly scalable architecture – especially human-centric and hardware-centric.

Intel and Data Centers : Introduction

Typical Design of a Software Defined Datacenter

The datacenter is then redesigned by Intel as a service provider, while being able to support the continued demand for content made ??by the users in respect of the services available on the Web on which Intel wants to move is clear : the data center must be able to treat the problem of big data and need to increase the density of installation to improve the distribution of the loads and increase the computational power on the same unit area. A focus goes to the consumption and energy efficiency and ease of management for an IT able to produce business results.

All of these intentions can be inferred from the conference which has argued several times a of transformation not only for the datacenter, but for IT in general. Specifically, Data centers are entering a new era in which rapid deployment of services are required. For networking products, servers and storage, significant growth opportunities are continuing. In many cases, it is necessary to adopt a new approach to ensure the required levels of scalability and efficiency and today  the planned interventions in the short and long term facilitate this transformation.

Intel and Data Centers : The Technological Innovations

Some of these transformations are concerned specifically with the hardware and processors for the server datacenter. So, Intel offers to look into the future with the new Atom processor, C2000 microserver and hardwares intended for storage systems with low energy consumption. This product, which really is not new, it has a 64-bit System on Chip (SoC) which is able to integrate up to 8 cores, natively supports Ethernet connections and supports up to 64 GB of memory. Energy efficiency is four times better than the first generation of Intel Atom without sacrificing on performance; on the contrary, it is improved by about 7 times compared to the previous product. This processor will close the 22 nm manufacturing technology and a 14 nm processor technology is planned for 2014. The new Atom 14 nm, codenamed Denverton, will have a greater compute density and will be the younger brother of the Xeon E3 Broadwell designed to withstand the loads at high operating computer graphics such as online gaming and multimedia transcoding.

From the words of Jason Waxman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Cloud Infrastructure group, there were the huge investments that the company is perpetrating on the Rack Scale Architecture (RSA): This structure is intended to allow a new data center flexibility in the distribution of new services with modular rack that separate the section of computing from storage memory. Among the companies that are already working with Intel to adopt it, there is Rackspace, which first scale implementation of rack based on Xeon processors and Intel Ethernet controllers with SSD storage.

Finally, the group did hint at the possibility of CPU and SoC customized for special customers, whose needs can not be met by the proposed standard hardware.