Intel Opens the Doors to Its Own IT Environment

Intel sheds light on the technologies, from chips to systems to software, it uses for its own business and how they have increased efficiency and cut costs.

Intel employs 6,319 IT professionals to support 104,820 workers at 153 sites in 72 countries. It runs 71 IT sites.

Intel’s IT professionals manage 149,632 mobile PCs, 50,100 smartphones, 15,355 desktop PCs and 4,800 tablets.

The chip maker has doubled the storage capacity over two years, increasing it from 72 petabytes in 2013 to 143 petabytes in 2015.

In 2013, Intel ran 58,863 servers in its data centers. Last year, the number hit 144,040.

The IT spending per employee dropped from $13,600 to $13,000 between 2013 and 2015, while the percentage of IT spend against revenue went from 2.7 percent to 2.5 percent in the same time period, an indication of greater IT efficiency.

Intel used its own PC hardware and Unite software to wirelessly connect more than 500 conference rooms, leveraging PCs armed with Core vPro chips that are used as hubs through which other devices can connect. It reduced the amount of time needed to start a meeting from minutes to seconds, improving employee productivity. The plan for 2016 is to expand the use of Unite to 2,300 conference rooms.

By using the cloud, Intel was able to reduce the amount of time needed for product qualification by three to four weeks.

The number of mobile apps developed by Intel jumped from 57 in 2013 to 238 last year, giving mobile employees more tools to do their jobs.

By enabling more connectivity and intelligence in systems and using such technologies as the cloud and big data, Intel saw $800 million in efficiencies and cost savings, data insight latency reduced from months to days, and 25 to 30 percent faster product design cycles.

The company blocked 225 million malware attacks in 2015, logged 13 billion security events per day to detect threats and remediated 12.2 million security events to fix vulnerabilities.

By using in-house testing and partnering with various products group, Intel’s IT department saw the time to detect and analyze system bugs drop from 60 minutes to 5 minutes, and saved almost $128,000 in engineering hours.

Intel’s high-performance computing environment, located at two sites, has seen a 90-fold increase in compute demand. It now runs more than 130,000 Xeon servers and more than 100,000 processor cores to support a 25 percent year-over-year compute growth. It’s highly efficient, with a PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.06, which is important, given that its load power is expected to increase from 43.5 megawatts last year to 70MW by 2018.

The use of in-memory processing—combining database software with Intel’s pre-tuned Xeon E7 v3-powered servers—will save Intel $37 million between 2015 and 2016 in inventory optimization, and will reduce the amount of resources needed to manage data processing by 45 percent. There also was a 63 percent reduction in database size.