To significantly reduce its total data center footprint and save between $1.4 and $1.8 billion over 7 years by replacing older technology with new multi-core Xeon processors, along with using techniques such as virtualization, Intel Corp. is reporting today that it is consolidating its 130 data centers worldwide to just 8 global hubs.

The chip giant expects this undertaking to create higher density data centers to allow it to be more flexible and energy efficient.

In an Intel “Data Center” blog post, the company’s data center efficiency initiative manager Brently Davis notes, “Like most other companies these days, Intel is facing a growing demand for computing resources. As a result, our computing costs are going up along with that demand. All of these issues prompted us to take a hard look at our data center strategy, to see where we could make it more efficient.”

He goes on to explain that the company has launched into a significant undertaking to consolidate the data centers, which is planned to take eight years, but that the company is working to complete sooner. “This initiative enables us to reduce costs, improve server and storage utilization, create higher density and more energy efficient data centers, and allows us to keep pace with our company’s rapid rate of innovation,” Davis writes. The effort is expected to deliver between $600 and $750 million in net present value.

Then, in a video blog, Davis goes into more detail about the project, explaining that the data center efficiency program was put into place approximately a year ago, and it supports 90,000 employees, 137 terabytes of WAN traffic, 93,000 servers in house and supporting those is very, very challenging.

“With so many data centers, and so many different footprints of those data centers, we had to come up with strategy on how to make the environment more efficient. So what we did was we said let’s put together a strategy that’s comprehensive – something that incorporates all of the different environments we have inside of Intel,” he continued.

The environment is called “D.O.M.E.,” which stands for “Design, office, manufacturing and enterprise” computing – broken up in order to break the manufacturing piece so that they could not impact manufacturing.

The strategy for DOME is to consolidate, virtualize and standardize all of Intel’s data centers, Davis says.

The aim of consolidating the data centers is to reduce the footprint and square footage. Next, Intel will virtualize the environment by utilizing virtualization capabilities, such as those created by Intel, along with use of virtual machine computing. In this aspect of the program, Woodcrest or multi-core processor-based servers are used.

Specifically in terms of the virtualization piece, Davis explains, “Virtualization is different for a lot of different companies. We’ve got two approaches for virtualization inside Intel. One is the data center virtualization program that was started about a year and a half ago. That is more of a GRID-computing solution, where they take soft resources and then allocate those servers out from a pool so that the design engineers can go off and use computing resources that are pooled together.”

“Our second instance of virtualization is the one that helps us build, which is more around virtual machines – so being able to consolidate a lot of images on dual-core or multi-core platforms and getting more images onto a server as opposed to what we have today: 2,500 applications that are normally on one server. Our ratio today is 1:1. One server actually has one operating system and we want to try to reduce that to a 4:1 process. We’ve started it – and the multi-core platforms have really helped us get there,” he added.

Read the original from ElectronicNews EDN, here.