Cloud-based IT strategies offer immense improvements for businesses in terms of agility, security and efficiency. However, this can come at the cost of complexity, as companies may have to deal with multiple vendors and services. This complexity also extends to workloads as businesses start adapting to new offerings such as cloud-native apps, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In order to simplify things and optimise workforce efficiency, Intel has worked in tandem with some of the top independent software vendors (ISVs) to optimise applications running in the cloud. The company notes that its solutions can help reduce risk and complexity, contribute to optimal performance and improve operational efficiency.
Here’s a look at some of the key benefits companies stand to gain with the adoption of Intel® technology in the cloud.
Intel has been developing and optimising its technologies to ensure that businesses can run with top performance-per-dollar. It does this by collaborating with top ISVs, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and cloud service providers (CSPs) to develop purpose-built instances. This includes Microsoft Azure DCsv2 virtual machines, which are designed to better support demanding tasks and workloads such as encryption and decryption of data, in-memory databases and data analytics.1
Further, Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors are designed to offer optimal performance on latency-sensitive workloads, such as database, edge and e-commerce applications to meet stringent customer requirements and service-level agreements. Intel notes that processors are the most widely deployed computing engine in public cloud services, providing agility and flexibility across all major CSPs.
Intel also offers a myriad of workload-tuned instance types that are tailored to fit different use cases and data sizes. This includes Intel® field-programmable gate arrays (Intel® FPGAs), Intel® SmartNICs, Intel® QuickAssist Technology and Intel® Optane™ persistent memory (PMem).
Many times, businesses make the mistake of choosing a platform technology that is only offered by a single CSP. As such, it runs the risk that workloads migrated to that environment may not work without significant refactoring and revalidation. This can not only lead to additional costs but also has an added risk of incompatibility.
Intel’s vast presence in the field means that a majority of the enterprise applications and open-sourced projects are developed first for Intel® architecture. Add to this the fact that Intel has been the leading Linux Kernel contributor for the last decade. Further, the company notes that it has nearly two decades of open-source experience with global scope, and is active in more than 650 open-source projects ranging from KVM to Kubernetes to TensorFlow.2 As such, investing in Intel technology-based cloud infrastructure, businesses can expect seamless enterprise workload migration not only within, but also across multiple CSPs as well as on-premises.
A key benefit of cloud-based workloads is scalability. Businesses have the option to quickly adjust scale and migrate workloads. Intel’s purpose-built architecture is designed to deliver consistent performance on a wide range of workloads. The company notes that this architecture is pervasive from edge to the data centre to cloud. It is not limited to specific CSPs or data centres.
Further, Intel strives to offer consistent, predictable application performance improvement with each new generation of its processors. As an example, the company notes that the 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors can offer up to 1.46x improvement as compared to its previous generation processors.3
On top of this, businesses need to also understand that while certain platform architecture may offer excellent performance at times, the underlying architecture design can introduce unpredictable latency into workloads. This can happen when accessing large amounts of memory and storage. Intel notes that its mesh architecture offers consistent and predictable workload-tuned performance even when businesses scale up their cloud instances.
Cost is obviously a key factor when it comes to picking cloud infrastructure and many different factors affect this cost. For instance, many enterprise-grade ISVs charge per core. As such, enterprises can save a lot if they can choose a server node that has fewer cores but offers similar performance to a higher-core count. Intel® Server Platforms offer just that, allowing enterprises to do more with less. Besides core count, other aspects of total costs to consider include migration ease, compatibility, and vendor lock-in risks.
Intel has also collaborated with Densify to develop Intel® Cloud Optimizer. This helps to optimize cloud, container and VMware infrastructure to provide recommendations of public cloud instances with the price and performance characteristics required for a specific workload. This should make it easier for businesses to choose the right cloud instances.
Trust is a very important factor when it comes to any business. Through decades of hard work and quality products, Intel is a name that is trusted by enterprises and consumers alike. In fact, Intel is such a trustworthy name that some of the leading ISVs like Oracle, SAP and VMware certify their cloud environments only or primarily on Intel.4 As if that isn’t enough, hybrid cloud offerings from the world’s leading CSPs were offered first and run primarily on Intel® architecture.
Intel notes that it has been co-engineering and developing cloud technologies since the start of the public cloud more than 15 years ago. This focus on collaboration still continues to this day. Due to these collaborations, businesses can have greater confidence when it comes to migrating workloads from on-premises to cloud or from one cloud instance to another, or from cloud to cloud.
Learning a whole set of new management tools for cloud workloads is something no IT team wants to do. Another similar issue is maintaining two sets of management tools. As such, workload migration can become a major challenge for businesses, even if they have the money and resources to go through with it. In order to lower barriers towards cloud adoption, notable hybrid cloud stacks such as AWS Outposts, Azure Stack, Google Cloud’s Anthos and VMware Cloud are optimized for Intel® architecture5 that offers intuitive management capabilities.
In order to make things even simpler, Intel processors feature built-in telemetry that can be used to achieve closed-loop automation to orchestrate containers, optimize power consumption and streamline root cause analysis. By using the telemetry capabilities of Intel® architecture, businesses can achieve high operational and infrastructure efficiency. It also allows for proper utilization, high performance and exceptional reliability.
As one can clearly see, Intel’s experience and expertise in the cloud has helped it to offer consistent, predictable performance across a broad and optimized software ecosystem. It also offers top-notch performance-per-dollar as well as wide availability across multiple CSPs.
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1, 2, 5. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/cloud-computing/top-reasons-for-cloud-guide.html
3. https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/performance/benchmarks/3rd-generation-intel-xeon-scalable-processors/
4. https://www.sap.com/dmc/exp/2014-09-02-hana-hardware/enEN/#/solutions?filters=iaas