SAN FRANCISCO: Intel has outlined its vision to reshape the data centre with new approaches for compute, storage and network technologies to make data centres more flexible and cost effective, measures that will be needed to meet looming challenges in data volumes and power consumption.

At its data centre event in San Francisco, Intel outlined its strategy, which amounts to creating a kind of reference architecture for data centre operators to follow. It comprises technologies for virtualising the network, making storage smarter, and re-architecting servers at the rack level to deliver a pool of resources that can better meet the requirements of applications.

These changes are needed in order to meet the changing requirements of data centres, driven by factors such as the boom in mobile devices and the success of services such as social media, according to Intel’s senior vice president of the data centre and connected systems group, Diane Bryant.

“If you look at where we are now, today’s infrastructure is strained. It can take weeks to reconfigure the network to support new processes. At the same time, we’ve moved from the traditional structured enterprise data to a world of unstructured data,” she said.

Intel’s solution is to create a blueprint for the software-defined data centre, using automation to enable it to adapt to changing requirements.

Perhaps the most radical part of the vision is Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) strategy, which “breaks down the artificial boundary of the server” in order to turn racks into pools of compute, storage and memory that can be used to provide an application with the optimum resources it requires, Bryant said.

Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s Cloud Infrastructure group, showed off two server “tray” designs that are a step on the road to delivering this vision, he claimed. One was filled with multiple Atom nodes, with a network mezzanine card at the rear that provides a switched fabric right in the tray, with silicon photonics interconnects to link each tray to a top-of-rack switch.

“Ideally, you want the rack to be completely modular, so you can upgrade each of the subsystems as you require, without having to rip out the whole server,” he said.

The other parts of the data centre blueprint involve virtualising the network, using software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV), the latter of which sees network functions such as a firewall or VPN delivered using virtual appliances running on standard servers.

On the storage side, Intel sees a growing role for SSD storage, perhaps integrated into the rack, while less frequently used data is relegated to low-cost disk storage in Atom-based storage nodes.

Intel stressed that its approach was standards-based, saying that the orchestration and management tools to deliver the software defined network vision would be delivered by third parties, such as the OpenStack cloud framework.

However, Intel pushed home the advantages of its x86 architecture chips, in the vast ecosystems of operating systems, applications and services that have built up around it.

“Software consistency is important,” said Waxman. “With other architectures, it’s not just about porting apps, it’s about the supporting database and the middleware,” he added.