Intel Corporation today announced a range of new technologies,
investments and industry collaborations aimed at making it easier to
deploy agile and scalable clouds so businesses can deliver new services
faster and drive revenue growth.
Businesses want flexibility and choice in cloud deployment models to
support innovation while maintaining control of their most strategic
assets. Despite a willingness to invest in modern software-defined
infrastructure (SDI), businesses find the prospect of doing
so themselves to be complex and time-consuming.
Intel is easing the path with new processors, solid state drives and a
range of industry collaborations to help businesses deliver new services
at the scale and speed previously found only in the most advanced public
clouds.
“Enterprises want to benefit from the efficiency and agility of cloud
architecture and on their own terms – using the public cloud offerings,
deploying their own private cloud, or both,” said Diane Bryant, senior
vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. “The
result is pent-up demand for software-defined infrastructure. Intel is
investing to mature SDI solutions and provide a faster path for
businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of the cloud.”
Key Ingredients for the Modern Cloud
SDI is the foundation for the most advanced clouds in the world. It
makes the delivery of cloud services faster and more efficient by
dynamically allocating the required compute, storage and network
resources through intelligent software, carefully orchestrating the
delivery of applications and services on-demand and across many users.
The Intel
Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family, built on 14nm process
technology, provides the key ingredients for SDI including Intel
Resource Director Technology, which enables customers to move to fully
automated SDI-based clouds with greater visibility and control over
critical shared resources like processor caches and main memory. The
result is intelligent orchestration and improved utilization and service
levels.
The new product family delivers improved performance for cloud tasks
with more than 20 percent more cores and cache than the prior generation,
supports faster memory, and includes other integrated technologies for
accelerating a wide range of server, network and storage workloads.
Security enhancements like workload isolation, security policy
enforcement and faster cryptography have been added to help
protect data more effectively.
For fast and reliable data access to the cloud, Intel unveiled new solid
state drives (SSDs) optimized for the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4
family, enterprise storage and cloud deployments. The Intel
SSD DC P3320 and P3520 Series are the first Intel SSDs to use the
industry’s highest density 3D NAND technology to provide users with a
highly efficient, dense storage solution. The DC P3320 offers up to a
5-times performance boost compared to SATA-based SSDs.
The new Intel
SSD DC D3700 and D3600 Series are Intel’s first dual-port PCI
Express* SSDs using the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol. The
dual-port design provides critical redundancy and failover, safeguarding
against data loss in mission-critical storage deployments. Customer
systems using the D3700 can see up to a 6-times increase in performance
over today’s dual-port SAS solutions.
Unleashing Tens of Thousands of New Clouds
As part of the Intel
Cloud for All initiative, Intel is investing in others in the
industry to accelerate SDI-enabled clouds, optimizing key technologies,
and aligning
the industry to drive the development of standards and
easy-to-deploy cloud solutions.
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Intel is collaborating
with CoreOS and Mirantis to bring together two of the most
popular open source technologies to orchestrate container and virtual
machine-based applications. The merging of these two technologies into
a single solution will simplify choices for cloud operators to
accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions.
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Intel and VMware announced a network of Centers of Excellence aimed
at accelerating cloud deployments. The centers will drive custom
optimizations, facilitate proof-of-concept testing and integrate
cybersecurity best practices in collaboration with The National
Institute of Standards and Technology.
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Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Intel announced the
world’s largest cloud application testing cluster for applications
“born in the cloud.” The cluster will include more than 1,000 Intel
Xeon processor-based server nodes designed to provide developers with
the opportunity to test applications at larger scales and deliver the
efficiency and portability of cloud native applications to businesses.
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Intel is expanding its Cloud Builders program to include SDI use cases
and accelerate ecosystem optimization efforts that allow customers to
take full advantage of infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
orchestration and automation. The new Storage Builders program also
aims to accelerate the industry’s use of cloud-ready, next-generation
storage solutions by fostering greater innovation by matchmaking
between in the cloud ecosystem. Intel currently has more than 300
member companies across its cloud, storage and network “builders”
programs.