Think about being on the moon; surrounded by tons of of thousand ft2 of house. A lot of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling methods 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 house, you might be within the clear room of one in every of Intel’s chip manufacturing services.
These services are refined, managed environments the place disruptions are extraordinarily expensive. In right here, we produce cutting-edge microchips, the place a single chip might be product of 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can price us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why numerous 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 workforce received the CX Buyer Hero of the Yr Award for our infrastructure modernization undertaking. 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 wanted to scale up and modernize our manufacturing capability. It additionally required advancing our safety posture to guard our and our clients’ mental property from dangerous actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.
Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the visitors stream between hundreds of instruments. These VACLs had grown into extremely lengthy and sophisticated lists, troublesome 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 Software Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This allowed us to maneuver to a extra fashionable, streamlined method for controlling 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 every single place, protecting each the manufacturing facility ground and our knowledge facilities, via open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate visitors throughout the manufacturing facility ground, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ device varieties, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West[2] visitors between the information middle and the manufacturing facility ground, offering essential deep packet inspection.
Crucially, the migration of those hundreds of VLANs was a monumental activity, and that is the place Cisco CX stepped in, offering the automation experience to characterize our complicated visitors flows, changing them into the EPGs and contracts important for our new ACI atmosphere.
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. For this reason Cisco’s Answer Validation Companies (which can be found through Skilled Companies) have been essential for us, permitting rigorous testing of all vital 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, making certain 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 undertaking 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 at present deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally includes uplifting our change and routing platforms to the newest Cisco Nexus expertise.
Automation might 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 grasp the issue – and even reshape the character of their help in line 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 international demand for chips, largely fueled by the explosion of AI.
In my opinion, it’s essential 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 powerful advocate and investor in addressing these issues, constructing new wafer fabrication services and increasing current ones within the US and Europe.
Nevertheless, with dangerous actors more and more concentrating on essential infrastructure, the trade should undertake a world-class safety posture. This implies steady modernization of our expertise infrastructure, implementing sturdy “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI undertaking – to guard these very 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 visitors refers to community communication that happens laterally between servers, purposes, or gadgets throughout the identical knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.
