Intel’s adoption and deployment of an enterprise private cloud is a perfect example of how the cloud can transform and improve internal efficiencies. The enterprise private cloud has already delivered some big benefits for Intel. The processor giant has already realized USD 9 million in savings and reduced provisioning time from 90 days to 45 minutes. Today, 80 percent of new business services are delivered through its enterprise private cloud.

Intel started on its cloud journey by applying key lessons from its Design Grid Computing environment (deployed between 2006 and 2008). It started an architectural transition focused on building a secure, service-oriented enterprise private cloud inside Intel for its office and enterprise environment. Accelerated virtualization and building an on-demand, self-service, and measured services capability played a critical first-step role in this endeavor, along with addressing security, manageability, automation, metering, and employee use model considerations.

However, 2011, was a year, in which the journey towards private cloud adoption accelerated. “In 2011, we continued to make rapid progress in transitioning to our enterprise private cloud. We focused on virtualizing more demanding applications, including Internet-facing and mission-critical applications with higher security requirements, and migrating them to the private cloud. Sixty-four percent of our office and enterprise environment is virtualized, and we are on track to reach our target of 75 percent,” explains Ajay Chandramouly, Cloud and Data Center Industry Engagement Manager, Intel IT.

“64 percent of our office and enterprise environment is virtualized; we are on track to reach our target of 75 percent”

Ajay Chandramouly, Cloud and Data Center Industry Engagement Manager, Intel IT

Tackling challenges head on

Intel’s deployment of enterprise private cloud is also a good case study to understand how an enterprise can tackle complex challenges. For example, like any other enterprise, there was a fear of the impact of a new approach, and whether this approach would prove risky to its business. Intel tackled this challenge by taking a pragmatic approach. It utilized Software-as-a-Service for non-differentiated business processes, wherein there were enough providers who could use economies of scale to provide Intel software through the cloud with excellent results.  Simultaneously, Intel also started its internal cloud work at its development environment, transitioned this to its test space, then to its tier 2-4 production environment.

Depending on the requirements of the business unit within the company, the company fine tuned its approach to get the required buy-in. “We need to establish the business principles that compel adoption of cloud.  If the business is TCO driven in some areas, then a thorough financial analysis along with clear tactics to maintain SLA will overcome resistance to change.  If the business is driven by need for agility and rapid response, then POC/pilot projects demonstrating “click to deploy” speed of solution development can be a strong motivator to the organization,” stated Chandramouly.

As the cloud momentum picked up, Intel also faced a serious issue in overcoming over-exuberance, as everyone was excited about the possibilities and opportunities presented by cloud computing. Intel tasked a team for trying most of the various cloud solutions and determining what the best strategy was for Intel.  Although the team was convinced that internal IaaS and PaaS/SaaS were the most likely goals for the near term, the team continually evaluated new cloud service offerings with an eye to potential adoption. The primary factors influencing the decision were TCO and business agility.

Intel also has a large effort underway to move most of its existing legacy applications to its cloud foundation which is its virtual infrastructure – Intel’s application teams take targets on execution, and as they get exposed to the virtual infrastructure, the organization starts exposing them to cloud attributes and how the new environment will help them in regards to productivity and time to market.

“We also have clear and evident senior management support from the CIO. We will lead in cloud as it makes business sense, and we will aggressively work toward that goal.  But we are careful to distinguish business needs from the exuberance that can come with hot new trends.  Establishing the criteria for that threshold is key,” states Chandramouly.

Enterprise cloud rains benefits

Today, the enterprise cloud has delivered heavily in every factor that is measurable – from cutting down costs, improving efficiencies, and reducing the time to provision new services.

“With 64 percent of our office and enterprise environment virtualized, we are achieving average server consolidation ratios of up to 20:1 and have already achieved net savings of USD 9 million to date. We anticipate additional net savings of approximately USD 6 million per year over the next four years,” says Chandramouly.

To maximize asset utilization across its data center environment, Intel is  refreshing its servers every four years. Through this approach, Intel has accommodated 45-percent annual growth in compute demand while reducing the number of servers in its environment from 100,000 to 75,000.

Following the success of the private cloud deployment, Intel is now extending the value of the private cloud to more groups and more usages across Intel. To enable Intel’s services businesses to meet unpredictable spikes in demand, the firm has increased flexibility by deploying a rapid, elastic infrastructure-as-a-service scaling solution to support externally facing Internet applications. Simultaneously, Intel has also embarked on a platform-as-a-service program to bring hosted on-demand development environments to its internal software developers. “Our goal is to enable developers to turn innovative ideas into production services in less than a day,” explains Chandramouly.

On the road to hybrid clouds

To further increase scalability, cost efficiency, and service resiliency, Intel has also established a technology roadmap for the use of hybrid clouds. “In 2011, we began sharing capacity across multiple resource pools inside a data center; in 2012, we plan to share capacity across all 13 private cloud data centers and then expand to hybrid use of secure external clouds,” says Chandramouly.

Intel also believes that in order to create an interoperable private and hybrid cloud environment, open industry standards and software are required. In 2011, Intel began running and testing its first completely open-source cloud environment. Chandramouly says that Intel’s goal is to determine where open solutions can augment its existing cloud capabilities—which can enable it to move towards its cloud vision at an even faster pace.