Think about being on the moon; surrounded by tons of of thousand ft2 of area. A lot of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling techniques transferring issues from level A to B. The few individuals round are sporting “bunny fits” [1] and masks. They appear like astronauts – they don’t seem to be. You aren’t in area, you might be within the clear room of one in every of Intel’s chip manufacturing services.
These services are subtle, managed environments the place disruptions are extraordinarily pricey. In right here, we produce state-of-the-art microchips, the place a single chip will be product of 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can price us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why loads of these factories run for years with none downtime. Nonetheless, 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 staff received the CX Buyer Hero of the Yr Award for our infrastructure modernization mission. On this weblog, I clarify why.
Intel’s Foundry Shift: Architecting for a New Period
In 2021, Intel introduced its intention to grow to be a “foundry” for the semi-conductor market, opening our services to exterior prospects to fabricate their merchandise.
This transfer meant that we wanted 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 1000’s of instruments. These VACLs had grown into extremely lengthy and complicated lists, tough to handle, and incapable of scaling to the intricate calls for of our new foundry enterprise. We would have liked an entire re-architecture.
In collaboration with Cisco, we determined to undertake Cisco’s Utility 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 in all places, masking each the manufacturing facility ground and our knowledge facilities, by open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate site visitors inside the manufacturing facility ground, 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 ground, offering important deep packet inspection.
Crucially, the migration of those 1000’s of VLANs was a monumental activity, 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 surroundings.
Deploying with Confidence: The Important Function of Answer Validation Companies
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 Answer Validation Companies (which can be found by way of Skilled Companies) 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 surroundings, with configurations and community element 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 an enormous win, this mission 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 achieved earlier than being rolled out to the remainder of the factories worldwide.
We’re presently deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally includes uplifting our change and routing platforms to the most recent Cisco Nexus expertise.
Automation can be a key enabler, and Cisco CX helps us with that. In Oregon, CX introduced in consultants 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 grasp the issue – and even reshape the character of their help in accordance with our wants. They didn’t simply present the expertise 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 world demand for chips, largely fueled by the explosion of AI.
For my part, it’s important to strengthen our provide chains within the West – the pendulum has moved too far offshore growing dangers, with necessary safety implications. Intel has been a robust advocate and investor in addressing these issues, constructing new wafer fabrication services and increasing present ones within the US and Europe.
Nonetheless, with unhealthy actors more and more concentrating on important infrastructure, the trade should undertake a world-class safety posture. This implies steady modernization of our expertise infrastructure, implementing strong “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI mission – to guard these important property and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing in opposition to subtle threats.
Learn extra:
IT@Intel Whitepaper: Reworking Industrial Manufacturing with Software program-Outlined Networking
[1] Lab robes
[2] East-West site visitors refers to community communication that happens laterally between servers, functions, or units inside the similar knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.
