Cloud Computing Solutions

IT managers are facing constraints on space, power, and costs. In the midst of these growing demands, a new class of solutions is emerging to transform the data center. Intel views this as an opportunity to deliver cloud-based architectures that enable federated (communications, data, and services move easily within and across cloud computing infrastructure), automated (services and resources can be specified, located, and securely provisioned with little to no human interaction) and client-aware (solutions recognize and optimize delivery of cloud-based applications to any end-user device) cloud services that are built with an open approach. To achieve this vision, Intel is driving an Open Data Center initiative to enable more secure, efficient, and simplified cloud data centers that preserve IT flexibility and choice.

Cloud computing is still in its early stages, with a wide variety of solutions available. As vendors strive to deliver new services and capabilities for the cloud, there is a need to balance the ease of deployment of highly integrated solutions with those that enable interoperability and flexibility to improve cost effectiveness. Without effective leadership and cooperation within the industry, cloud computing will evolve into fragmented solutions that are too expensive and too difficult to deploy and maintain. Intel is working with customers and the industry to realize the benefits of open, multi-vendor cloud solutions with capabilities that are federated, automated, and client-aware.

To achieve this vision, Intel is driving an Open Data Center initiative to enable more secure, efficient, and simplified cloud data centers that preserve IT flexibility and choice, increase efficiencies, and reduce costs.

Use the Interactive Cloud Tool to learn how Intel technologies can optimize your cloud.

Safer migration. Pervasive encryption. Better isolation.

In a public cloud, and in many private clouds, your data is on a server controlled by someone else, which means keeping your data secure is essential. In addition, new cloud architectures make new modes of attack possible. Intel® technology, including Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT), Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard Instructions (AES-NI), and Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) included in the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series improves security by enabling increased isolation and safer migration of virtual machines, faster data encryption/decryption, and hardware-assisted protection against launch-time attacks, making the cloud work for you.

Lower cost. Less energy. Less space.

As space, power, and cooling capacities become limited, maximizing efficiency plays a critical role in preparing for the cloud. Intel technology drives efficiency across multiple areas, including leading silicon power optimization and performance, advanced data center power management, and improved virtualization capabilities. For example, advanced technologies like Intel® Intelligent Power Node Manager and Intel® Data Center Manager (Intel® DCM), along with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series, enable significant improvements in data-center efficiency, making the cloud work for you.

Simplify your infrastructure. Reduce complexity.

Reining in the complexity associated with the proliferation and expansion of data centers is a vital step in cloud deployment. By improving automated virtual machine migration, simplifying manageability, enabling unified 10GbE networks, and driving the convergence of storage and servers, Intel technology—including Intel® Virtualization Technology, Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) and Intel® 10Gb Ethernet Adapters along with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series, and Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series—can simplify your infrastructure now and help maintain simplicity moving forward, making the cloud work for you.

Responding to the demands of Global IT Leaders

As a technical advisor to the Open Data Center Alliance, an independent organization of leading global IT managers, Intel will align our technology with many of the usage models defined by the Alliance that address key IT challenges. Some of the usage models Intel is advising on include trusted compute pools for better security, policy-based power management for improved efficiency, and balanced compute in the cloud for more simplified cloud infrastructure.

Intel's Vision of the Ongoing Shift to Cloud Computing

A Paradigm Shift

Cloud computing is an important transition and a paradigm shift in IT services delivery—one that promises large gain in efficiency and flexibility at a time when demands on data centers are growing exponentially. The tools, building blocks, solutions, and best practices for cloud computing are evolving, and challenges to deploying cloud solutions need to be considered.

Intel® Cloud Builders provides best practices and practical guidance on how to deploy, maintain, and optimize a cloud infrastructure. Download detailed reference architectures and best practices to help you get started today.

The Open Data Center Alliance is an independent organization of leading global IT managers who have come together to deliver requirements for next-generation datacenters and cloud that meet IT challenges in an open, industry-standard, and multi-vendor fashion.

Big data sets require big compute power. Machine translation, speech recognition and video processing are some examples of these big data sets. Since they are so large, these big data sets usually require parallel processing and parallel storage systems, often using clustered resources that are accessed over the web. This is the basic model that is referred to as Cloud Computing. Researchers at Intel’s lab in Pittsburgh have two initiatives that support this cloud computing paradigm - OpenCirrus and Tashi.

OpenCirrus is a joint initiative started by Intel, HP and Yahoo as well as academic partners. In a back room of the lab, server racks with nearly 1000 cores were running the Tashi operating environment software that manages the 400 terabytes of resources in the cluster. Individuals and groups can submit proposals to utilize these large clusters to run experiments and develop applications.

New "Nehalem" servers will anchor Intel's renewed push into cloud computing, as the chipmaker focuses on mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers.

Intel's cloud-computing efforts this year will be centered on a new server that uses upcoming Nehalem technology, Intel said Tuesday in a teleconference on its cloud-computing strategy. Nehalem is Intel's new chip architecture currently used only in its Core i7 desktop processors.

Mega data centers potentially mean mega-growth. The world's largest chipmaker sees between 20 percent and 25 percent of server shipments going to mega data centers by 2012. Today mega data centers represent about 10 percent of the server market, according to Intel.

And what is cloud computing to Intel? A cloud architecture aimed at mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers that "can be balanced automatically. Automatically resized and scaled," according to Jason Waxman, general manager of high-density computing at Intel's Server Platforms Group. "Your service is stateless: it's not the same server every time. At any point in time I'm not necessarily accessing the same server."

Intel's goal is to optimize this massive mesh of server hardware. "Optimization is key. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of servers, every server, every watt, every network connection represents cost," he said.

Waxman said Intel will use its upcoming Nehalem silicon to spearhead its renewed push into mega data centers. "We've designed a server for a Nehalem-based board that's optimized for our cloud-computing infrastructure," said Waxman. The "Willowbrook" motherboard will be launched later this quarter, according to Waxman.

Willowbrook is designed with "very efficient voltage regulation," he said, and "we've optimized the layout of the boards" so air can flow more efficiently across the board. Waxman added that "idle power" has been reduced--a crucial metric for mega data centers. "We've been able to take out power. At idle, a standard Nehalem platform consumes 110 to 115 watts, we've been able to get it down to the sub-85 watt range," he said.

Overall, optimization and power savings boils down to cost. For a large cloud service provider, 50 percent of the total cost is the compute infrastructure--servers and storage--and 25 percent is delivering the power and cooling, he said. "75 percent of the (total cost of ownership) is computer, power, and cooling. And this is what Intel is focused on. Optimize the servers and get every watt we can out the servers."

Waxman said repeatedly that Intel is not going to be a service provider but wants to enable customers to take advantage of Intel cloud-computing technology. "We're not trying to become a service provider but we bring all this core technology and expertise together. The capability to look at a cloud and optimize it," he said.

He cited Salesforce.com, IBM, and Microsoft as service providers and added that "it's sort of a wild west frontier" as many of the more comprehensive cloud-computing service products from major companies are not in production yet.

Other technologies that Intel will roll out with Nehalem server chips include Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDQ) that allow traffic to be queued up and aim to resolve an outstanding problem in which one virtual machine can hog all the bandwidth. Waxman also discussed the "I/O hub" technology that Intel is implementing with Nehalem. "It has a tremendous number of PCI Express Gen 2 lanes. Gen 2 for speed and more lanes--that's kind of our strategy," he said. The Peripheral Component Interconnect or PCI bus is a data path to a computer's peripheral devices such as a network card or graphics card.

Waxman also discussed a Node manager. "Within a data center, I'm trying to figure out how to use as many servers as I possibly can and one of the challenges of optimizing a cloud is how do you make sure you don't overload a server and create a server hot spot," he said. The Node manager will reside in the motherboard BIOS.