Datacenter Products and Technologies at IDF2013

September 10, 2013, Intel Developer Forum, San Francisco—Diane Bryant from Intel talked about Intel’s support for the datacenter and connected systems. The transformation in the IT areas is changing the category from a support for the business to a major part of the business.

The IT space has morphed from corporate center in the ’90’s, to networks in the ’00’s, to personal connectivity. One big trend is for more datacenters to be cloud based to better deliver services. The increasing number of connected devices means that the datacenter needs more agility.

Even though servers are highly virtualized, overall server utilization is under 50 percent of capacity. Storage is growing at a CAGR of 40 percent, and 90 percent of the new data is unstructured. Networks can take up to 3 weeks for provisioning and reconfiguration. As a result of the changes, software-defined infrastructure—compute, networks and storage—are becoming essential.

To meet the growing requirements for greater agility, the Xeon E5 v2 family of server CPUs, based on the Ivybridge architecture, are now available. The family has 21 products and all have been migrated to the 22nm process. The new process provides a 45 percent improvement in energy efficiency and increased functionality. The CPUs range from 8 to 12 cores with up to 30Mb of cache, and increased memory address space.

Security functions provide operating system guarding and separate OS and application domains prevent many incursions. A secure key 64-bit random number generator is built in to the chip. All of the capabilities are directed towards the changes and increases in workloads for all servers. The changes in architectures and internal structures have resulted in significant improvements in benchmark performance.

Some OEM partners like IBM, Inspur, ATT, HP, Amazon made some short statements in support of the Intel programs. IBM announced new System X components. Inspur is adding Xeon processors to the storage arrays to add more compute to the data. This computational intelligence improves data reliability and adds other functions to the storage array. These new functions facilitate the software-defined systems and increased automation.

ATT is experimenting with software-defined architectures to address the increases in data traffic and is also working to add more compute to the storage. They need greater agility for their business. HP also noted the changes in communications that are affecting the capabilities stack. Telco is becoming an IT function and standards and standard APIs are the necessary glue to make the dynamic, virtualized network happen.

Amazon noted that enterprises are moving to cloud-based systems to augment their datacenters. The moves are forcing the development of new applications which support new businesses. As a result, the cloud providers have to create new services and features to support these new apps. Companies are developing hybrid cloud architectures to enable backup and analytics in the cloud while all other functions remain in the datacenter. To support the increased functionality, they are moving to the E5 chips later this year.

Intel’s net builder program is working on standards-based networks and systems to help users develop greater efficiency and performance, while reducing development costs. The program has 29 companies working of the various aspects of the software-defined systems. The Xeon E5 is shipping and the increased integration of functions is adding new capabilities to the storage, networks, and other systems components in the software-defined everything.