Intel Looks to Products, Partnerships to Build Clouds

At its Cloud Day event, Intel unveiled new products, collaborations and programs all aimed at making it easier for businesses to run workloads in the cloud.

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, said a recent study found that on average, businesses run six cloud systems, a mix of both private and public. “I think when we look back at what cloud computing has done, we’ll see that it had a bigger impact than PCs did in the 1990s,” she said.

The 14-nanometer Xeon E5-2600 v4 Broadwell processors offer more cores (up to 22 versus up to 18), 44 percent better performance, improved server utilization and better security features than their 22nm Haswell predecessors.

New chips will help create the software-defined infrastructure (SDI) that will bring the agility and scalability needed to support cloud environments, Intel officials said. One new feature in the chips is Resource Director Technology for improved orchestration and utilization, allowing for fully automated clouds and better control over shared resources.

Intel introduced new fast solid-state drives that bring a lot of capacity. They also offer Intel’s first SSDs with 3D NAND technology from Micron for greater density. Among the SSDs is the P3320, which offers up to five times the performance of SATA-based SSDs, officials said.

Along with products, Intel is being aggressive in collaborating with other companies and creating developer initiatives—such as its new Storage Builder Program—to establish more of a platform play for addressing the cloud. At the event, Intel said it is collaborating with CoreOS and Mirantis to enable customers to use open-source technologies in their cloud efforts.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise officials announced they are refreshing HPE’s line of ProLiant Gen9 processors—including the one- or two-socket DL380—with Intel’s new chips.

HPE also unveiled the company’s new Persistent Memory technology, which combines the performance of DRAM and the persistent, nonvolatile capabilities of storage to speed up such workloads as databases, data analytics and online transaction processing. The first product, the 8GB NVDIMM, will first appear in the ProLiant DL360 and DL380.

Dell upgraded its PowerEdge 13th generation systems—including the R730—with the new Intel processors, which give the systems performance improvements of more than 20 percent when combined with new air-cooling technology from the OEM and more than 12 percent enhanced memory, officials said.

Dell officials announced the company’s VR Ready program with new Precision workstations that include the Intel Xeon E5 chips. The new systems not only include a lot of compute power, but also powerful GPU options from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

Lenovo refreshed a range of System x, NeXtScale and ThinkServer servers—including its ThinkServer RD450—with Intel’s new processors. At the same time, Lenovo is bringing its XClarity systems management software to all of its dual-processor systems.

The systems maker is bringing the processors to its SuperServer, SuperBlade (pictured), SuperStorage, SuperWorkstation, and dual- and single-processor motherboard product lines.