Intel Outlines Server And Data Centre Approach

Intel has again highlighted its intention to play a significant role in the way future data centre infrastructures are built, operated and managed.

That role will still include processors – the chip giant has an aggressive launch schedule for chips for data centre systems in 2013 that include new Atom and Xeon processors – but also will increasingly move into how the servers themselves are designed.

Keynote Speech

During her keynote speech 9 April at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, outlined the chip maker’s vision of systems that not only are powered by Intel processors, but also are designed and built using Intel technology, ranging from networking to storage.

During a recent briefing with reporters to outline Intel vision, Lisa Graff, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter Marketing Group, said Intel is working on reference designs for “a rack-scale architecture” and already is working with some top-tier Chinese Web companies and telecommunications vendors in what is called Project Scorpio, aimed at building server racks that share components like power, cooling and networking.

For the reference architectures that will start rolling out next year, Graff said Intel was engaging in similar collaboration.

“We’re working with end users, OEMs, and ISVs to drive common standards in a reference architecture,” she said, adding what Intel will offer will be something organisations can build upon. “Our reference architecture isn’t a recipe. … Others can use what they want; they can pick and choose.”

Graff noted that that the changing demands for bandwidth, processing power, energy efficiency and storage – brought on by such trends as cloud computing, big data, increased services and more mobile computing devices hitting the network – are driving the need for new architectures in the data center.

Her comments echoed a key theme that was talked about 8 April, when Hewlett-Packard unveiled the first of its ultra-dense, highly-efficient Project Moonshot servers: The demands in the data center are changing, and the infrastructure within the data centres will have to change along with it.

Strategic Changes

Intel over the past several years has aggressively been building its capabilities in several areas beyond its traditional processor technologies, including networking, storage, security and software. The company has been bringing many of those capabilities onto the silicon, but also will use them in helping create a fabric for the data centre. For example, in February, Intel released its own Hadoop distribution for big data environments. The Intel Hadoop offering has been used by several companies in China by carrier China Mobile and traffic management company Bocom.

Intel officials want to bring the idea of balanced systems from the servers to the racks to create groupings of servers, storage and networking products that are more modular, efficient and dense. That’s already happening to some extent, with non-essential sheet metal taken out of the racks and components such as fans and power supplies taken from servers and put into the rack, where they are shared by all servers, Graff said.

There also are what she called emerging trends of removing storage from compute systems and leveraging storage virtualisation for greater utilisation, a move that is enabled through the development of a compute and network fabric that allows the separation of storage from the server without hindering performance. Graff pointed to Intel’s Silicon Photonics interconnects as technology that brings higher speed connections between systems within the rack.

Down the road will come the separation of the processors, memory and I/O, which then will be housed in modular subsystems. This will enable organisations to upgrade these subsystems without having to completely upgrade the whole system.

Project Scorpio – which involves Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and China Telecom – is an illustration of what Intel is talking about, Graff said.

Future Roadmap

Intel in 2013 also will roll out new processors for data centre systems designed to bring greater performance, power efficiency, I/O capabilities and security features, according to Graff. The most aggressive roadmap is with the low-power Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform, including the upcoming “Avoton” and “Rangeley” chips. Avoton will be the second-generation Atom – after “Centerton,” released in December 2012 – for ultra low-power microservers, including HP’s Moonshot systems. The 22-nanometer chips are sampling now and will be released in the second half of 2013.

The microserver segment is one of several arenas in the increasingly intense competition between Intel and ARM. HP will use chips from Intel as well as ARM partners – such as Calxeda and Marvell Technologies – in its Moonshot systems, with officials saying the use of multiple chip architectures is a key part of creating their “software-defined servers.”

Rangeley will be an Atom SoC designed specifically for networking devices, Graff said.

“By the end of 2013, we will have four 64-bit Atom products – two for microservers, one for storage and one uniquely configured for networks,” she said.

In mid-2013, Intel will release the 22-nm “Haswell,” the next generation of the company’s Xeon E3 portfolio that will include integrated graphics and a power consumption of 13 watts, down from the current chip’s 17 watts. The integrated graphics will be key for video workloads, Graff said. Also this year, Intel will release media software developer kits for Linux and Windows.

In the third quarter, Intel will release “Ivy Bridge-EP,” a 22-nm Xeon E5 chip with improved energy efficiency and security capabilities. Following in the fourth quarter will be “Ivy Bridge-EX” in the Xeon E7 family, which will triple the memory capacity – up to 12 TB in an eight-socket node – over the current E7 chips, and will offer improved reliability and uptime by running Intel’s Run Sure Technology.

The Intel Developer Forum this week in Beijing will show off the range of offerings that are coming from Intel, Graff said.

“We are bringing innovation at the processor and rack levels,” she said.

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Originally published on eWeek.