Think about being on the moon; surrounded by a whole bunch of thousand ft2 of house. Many of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling methods shifting issues from level A to B. The few folks round are sporting “bunny fits” (1) and masks. They seem like astronauts – they don’t seem to be. You aren’t in house, you’re 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 expensive. In right here, we produce state-of-the-art 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 plenty of these factories run for years with none downtime. However, our cutting-edge services require fashionable, state-of-the-art infrastructure, which creates a conundrum:
How do you modernize your infrastructure with zero-downtime?
This yr, my group received the CX Buyer Hero of the 12 months 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 turn into a “foundry” for the semi-conductor market, opening our services to exterior clients 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 clients’ 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 move between hundreds 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 wanted 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 fashionable, streamlined strategy 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 instrument units, exactly controlling knowledge move between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI all over the place, overlaying each the manufacturing facility flooring and our knowledge facilities, by means of open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate site visitors throughout the manufacturing facility flooring, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ instrument varieties, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West(2) site visitors between the info middle and the manufacturing facility flooring, offering crucial deep packet inspection.
Crucially, the migration of those hundreds of VLANs was a monumental job, and that is the place Cisco CX stepped in, offering the automation experience to characterize our complicated site visitors flows, changing them into the EPGs and contracts important for our new ACI atmosphere.
Deploying with Confidence: The Crucial Position 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. Because of this Cisco’s Answer Validation Companies (which can be found through Skilled Companies) have been crucial for us, permitting rigorous testing of all important new capabilities earlier than they went reside.
Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing facility atmosphere, 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 crops remained safe and operational.
From Oregon to the World: Scaling to our International 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 primary hub the place all first-kind installs are finished earlier than being rolled out to the remainder of the factories worldwide.
We’re at the moment deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally entails uplifting our swap and routing platforms to the most recent 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 response to 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 world demand for chips, largely fueled by the explosion of AI.
In my opinion, it’s crucial to strengthen our provide chains within the West – the pendulum has moved too far offshore rising dangers, with necessary safety implications. Intel has been a powerful 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 focusing on crucial infrastructure, the business should undertake a world-class safety posture. This implies steady modernization of our know-how infrastructure, implementing sturdy “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI mission – to guard these very important belongings and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing towards 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, purposes, or units throughout the similar knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.
