Aiming to make enterprise cloud adoption easier and faster, Intel yesterday unveiled new lines of processors and solid-state drives, as well as several new collaborative efforts under its Cloud for All initiative.
There is a “pent-up demand” for software-defined infrastructure because some businesses have been reluctant to make the shift, according to Intel executive Diane Bryant. Intel’s new offerings are aimed at these companies which, while ready to invest in cloud-based architectures, are daunted by the perceived time and effort required for such moves.
Announced during the company’s Data Center Group Cloud Day event, Intel’s new products include a family of E5-2600 v4 Xeon processors, along with several new solid-state drives (SSDs) that are optimized for that processor line. Built with 3D NAND technology, the new SSDs offer high-density storage capabilities with a five-times performance boost compared to other drives, according to Intel.
Built for ‘Efficiency, Performance, Agility’
The new line of E5-2600 v4 Xeon processors builds on the existing family of products that Intel aimed at “a new generation of data centers,” senior director of data center product marketing Jennifer Huffstetler wrote yesterday on Intel’s Data Stack blog. “They are designed expressly for next-generation data centers running on SDI, and they are supercharged for efficiency, performance, and agility across cloud-native and traditional applications.”
The new chips provide faster memory and over 20 percent more cores and cache than the previous generation, according to Intel’s specifications. With multi-core, multi-threaded processing, they also feature integrated technologies to improve performance across a range of workloads, enabling users to wring more value out of new servers and speed up the transition to software-defined infrastructure.
The E5-2600 v4 line of processors also includes Intel’s Resource Director Technology, which “provides deeper visibility and control over shared platform resources to enable smarter orchestration,” Intel said. “This suite of technologies help[s] IT organizations improve service levels and infrastructure utilization and accelerate their move toward fully automated SDI.”
New Cloud-Focused Partnerships, Centers of Excellence
Designed to work in tandem with its latest processors, Intel’s new SSD DC P3320 and P3520 solid-state drive series are the first to use 3D NAND technology, the company said. Two other new drive lines — the SSD DC D3700 and D3600 series — are Intel’s first dual-port PCI Express SSDs to use the Non-Volatile Memory Express protocol.
“The dual-port design provides critical redundancy and failover, safeguarding against data loss in mission-critical storage deployments,” Intel said in its press announcement for the new drives. “Customer systems using the D3700 can see up to a 6-times increase in performance over today’s dual-port SAS solutions.”
Among the new Cloud for All partnerships Intel announced yesterday is a collaborative effort with CoreOS and Mirantis to provide container-based orchestration and applications for virtual machines; a new network of Centers of Excellence being launched with VMware to speed up cloud deployments according to best practices; a new cloud application testing cluster being launched with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; and a Storage Builders program to promote innovation and matchmaking among companies operating in the cloud ecosystem.
Image Credit: Intel (pictured above, Intel Xeon Processor E5 v4 processor).
