Think about being on the moon; surrounded by a whole lot of thousand ft2 of area. A lot of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling programs shifting issues from level A to B. The few individuals round are carrying “bunny fits” [1] and masks. They seem like astronauts – they aren’t. You aren’t in area, you might be within the clear room of certainly one of Intel’s chip manufacturing services.
These services are refined, managed environments the place disruptions are extraordinarily pricey. In right here, we produce cutting-edge microchips, the place a single chip may be made from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can price us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why a number of these factories run for years with none downtime. However, our cutting-edge services require trendy, state-of-the-art infrastructure, which creates a conundrum:
How do you modernize your infrastructure with zero-downtime?
This 12 months, my workforce received the CX Buyer Hero of the 12 months Award for our infrastructure modernization venture. On this weblog, I clarify why.
Intel’s Foundry Shift: Architecting for a New Period
In 2021, Intel introduced its intention to turn out to be a “foundry” for the semi-conductor market, opening our services to exterior prospects to fabricate their merchandise.
This transfer meant that we would have liked to scale up and modernize our manufacturing capability. It additionally required advancing our safety posture to guard our and our prospects’ mental property from unhealthy actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.
Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the site visitors stream between hundreds of instruments. These VACLs had grown into extremely lengthy and complicated lists, troublesome to handle, and incapable of scaling to the intricate calls for of our new foundry enterprise. We wanted an entire re-architecture.
In collaboration with Cisco, we determined to undertake Cisco’s Software Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This allowed us to maneuver to a extra trendy, streamlined method for controlling site visitors flows utilizing Endpoint Teams (EPGs) and Contracts. This new mannequin allows us to create granular safety insurance policies and apply them to particular device units, exactly controlling knowledge stream between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI all over the place, masking each the manufacturing facility flooring and our knowledge facilities, by way of open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate site visitors inside the manufacturing facility flooring, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ device varieties, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West[2] site visitors between the information middle and the manufacturing facility flooring, offering important deep packet inspection.
Crucially, the migration of those hundreds of VLANs was a monumental process, and that is the place Cisco CX stepped in, offering the automation experience to characterize our advanced site visitors flows, changing them into the EPGs and contracts important for our new ACI atmosphere.
Deploying with Confidence: The Crucial Position of Resolution Validation Providers
Given the unforgiving nature of our factories, after we deploy new capabilities in a manufacturing facility, we need to guarantee issues will work proper the primary time round. This is the reason Cisco’s Resolution Validation Providers (which can be found through Skilled Providers) have been important for us, permitting rigorous testing of all important new capabilities earlier than they went dwell.
Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing facility atmosphere, with configurations and community part integrations that have been a real reflection of our manufacturing setup, tuned over years to remain in sync. This pre-deployment validation gave us a excessive diploma of confidence that any potential points had been recognized and resolved within the lab, guaranteeing our manufacturing vegetation remained safe and operational.
From Oregon to the World: Scaling to our World Community
Whereas having an award-winning deployment is a giant win, this venture is a multi-year funding for us. Our Oregon facility – the place this deployment occurred – is the principle hub the place all first-kind installs are executed earlier than being rolled out to the remainder of the factories worldwide.
We’re presently deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally entails uplifting our swap and routing platforms to the newest Cisco Nexus know-how.
Automation will probably be a key enabler, and Cisco CX helps us with that. In Oregon, CX introduced in specialists to do the characterization and assist us automate our workflow – one thing we didn’t have the bandwidth or the assets to do ourselves. What actually impressed me was that they took the time to know the issue – and even reshape the character of their assist in accordance with our wants. They didn’t simply present the know-how framework; they supported us programmatically too, which gave us the momentum to maneuver ahead.
Securing the Way forward for Chip Manufacturing within the West
Zooming out, the broader context for our efforts is the surging international demand for chips, largely fueled by the explosion of AI.
In my opinion, it’s important to strengthen our provide chains within the West – the pendulum has moved too far offshore rising dangers, with vital safety implications. Intel has been a robust advocate and investor in addressing these issues, constructing new wafer fabrication services and increasing current ones within the US and Europe.
Nevertheless, with unhealthy actors more and more focusing on important infrastructure, the business should undertake a world-class safety posture. This implies steady modernization of our know-how infrastructure, implementing strong “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI venture – to guard these important property and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing in opposition to refined threats.
Learn extra:
IT@Intel Whitepaper: Remodeling Industrial Manufacturing with Software program-Outlined Networking
[1] Lab robes
[2] East-West site visitors refers to community communication that happens laterally between servers, purposes, or units inside the identical knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.