April 17th, 2007

A peek at Intel's data center strategy

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 12:12 pm

Categories: Datacenter, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Intel

Tags:

Two Intel executives shed some light on Intel's data center strategy at the Intel Developers Forum in Beijing. Biggest takeaway: Intel has some old data centers that need replacing.

In the IDF (gallery left) presentation by Intel's Martin Menard, director of platform capability, and James Chen, director IT consulting service, a few key stats jump out at you. Among them:

• Data centers cost between $100 million to $200 million to build and operate;

• Intel has 136 data centers around the globe;
• Sixty-two percent of those data centers are more than 10 years old.

The primary slides are compiled in this gallery (right). Like most companies, Intel's data center plans revolve around consolidation, virtualization and then optimizing assets. Intel's big pitch seemed to be that there's ROI in refreshing data center assets sooner than later. That's no surprise given Intel will benefit as all of those new servers are sold.

That said there may be something to Intel's pitch. As virtualization is rolled out you increasingly need hardware upgrades. Meanwhile, maintaining ancient data centers may not be the most efficient use of your capital.

Another interesting thread is just the scale that Intel is dealing with. Menard reports to Intel's office of the CIO and is primarily supports the chip maker's product planning and design engineering groups. By the numbers that's 30,000 employees.

More data center reading to ponder:

• Portable data centers: Will Microsoft prime the demand pump?
• Dell will build you a ‘kit car’ for your data center.
• Computerworld: Liquid cooling returns to the data center.
• Sun’s data center in a box.
• Baseline calculator: Packing Up Your Data Center.
• BNET: Remodeling an Active Data Center: Management, Planning & Communications Mitigate Risks During the Project.