SEATTLE, — Intel
is continuing the aggressive expansion of the hardware, software and services
offerings the chip maker offers to systems makers to sell to businesses.
In the first
half of 2012, Intel’s Enterprise Platform and Services Division (EPSD) will
roll out 12 new platform offerings—such as motherboards for servers and
workstations—that not only will hit mainstream enterprises, but also will be
targeted at such areas as high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing
environments, embedded devices and smaller businesses.
At a press
briefing during the SC 11 supercomputing show here Nov. 15, Lisa Graff, vice
president and general manager of Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, said the
new products are part of a larger rollout of offerings that began when she took
over the business two years ago. Intel has been in the business of selling such
products to systems makers for a couple of decades, but Graff said the company
needed to expand what it offers.
“We probably
had some gaps in our [product lineup],” she told eWEEK. She noted that the EPSD’s customers—from server makers like
Penguin Computing, SGI and Appro to storage solution providers like Symantec
and iXsystems—cover a wide range of computing needs. “They do it all, so we
have to do it all to be successful.”
The new
motherboard offerings rolling out the first half of next year touch on
everything from half-width boards for HPC environments to other products for
virtualization and workloads that call for high-end I/O and high amounts of
memory. There also are new chasses that offer such differentiators as cooling
capabilities on every node, and new systems. The motherboards also will support
Intel’s new Xeon E5 Sandy Bridge processors,
which offer up to eight cores and are designed for such environments as HPC and
virtualization. Earlier at the show, Intel executives touted the performance
and energy-efficiency capabilities of the Xeon E5.
During her
press briefing, Graff noted that of the 10 systems on the Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers
that use the Xeon E5, six of those are based on products from the EPSD.
In addition,
Graff said, after the new 12 offerings are launched in the first half of 2012,
more will be hitting the market later in the year. Intel also is planning to
enable the EPSD hardware offerings to support the company’s upcoming Many Integrated Core (MIC) coprocessors, which
are designed to work with the chip maker’s CPUs to offer parallel-processing
capabilities.
Earlier in the
week at SC 11, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Intel’s Technical Computing
Group, showed off the first of the MIC coprocessors—a chip with more than 50
cores named Knights Corner—as well as a test system powered by the product.
“We’ll build
[into the EPSD motherboards] the capability to support them,” Graff said.
She said that
when she came to the EPSD, the feedback she got from systems makers was that they
wanted more products—more boards, more systems, more chasses; they wanted
offerings beyond hardware, in software and services; and they wanted Intel to
keep up the quality and technical support. Since then, Intel has rolled
out three times the number of hardware SKUs, and has rapidly evolved its
software and services capabilities.
In 2011,
Intel’s EPSD grew the services its partners could sell to end users, and
expanded its software offerings, with such products as Intel Multi-Server
Manager, which enables businesses to manage up to 100 servers at the same time.
In addition, the company is rolling out the new Intel Continuity Suite, which
lets users manage their virtualized servers, RAID, and hardware backup and
recovery from the same interface. Until now, all those areas had to manage
through separate windows.
The goal is to
simplify the management hassles that come with virtualization, Graff said.
“Virtualization
can be challenging, especially for SMBs [small and midsize businesses],” she
said during the press conference.
The full
Continuity Suite will be available in 2012.
IT & Network Infrastructure News & Reviews 
