Think about being on the moon; surrounded by lots of of thousand ft2 of area. A lot of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling programs shifting issues from level A to B. The few individuals round are sporting “bunny fits” [1] and masks. They appear to be astronauts – they don’t seem to be. You aren’t in area, you’re within the clear room of certainly one of Intel’s chip manufacturing services.
These services are subtle, managed environments the place disruptions are extraordinarily pricey. In right here, we produce cutting-edge microchips, the place a single chip could be fabricated from 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. However, 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 yr, my workforce received the CX Buyer Hero of the Yr Award for our infrastructure modernization challenge. 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 dangerous actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.
Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the site visitors movement between 1000’s 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 wanted a whole re-architecture.
In collaboration with Cisco, we determined to undertake Cisco’s Software Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This allowed us to maneuver to a extra trendy, streamlined strategy for controlling site visitors flows utilizing Endpoint Teams (EPGs) and Contracts. This new mannequin permits us to create granular safety insurance policies and apply them to particular instrument units, exactly controlling knowledge movement between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI in all places, masking each the manufacturing facility ground 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 inside the manufacturing facility ground, 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 ground, offering vital deep packet inspection.
Crucially, the migration of those 1000’s of VLANs was a monumental job, 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 Vital Position of Resolution Validation Providers
Given the unforgiving nature of our factories, once we deploy new capabilities in a manufacturing facility, we wish to guarantee issues will work proper the primary time round. That is why Cisco’s Resolution Validation Providers (which can be found through Skilled Providers) had been vital for us, permitting rigorous testing of all vital new capabilities earlier than they went stay.
Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing facility surroundings, with configurations and community element integrations that had 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 challenge 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 accomplished 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 change and routing platforms to the newest Cisco Nexus know-how.
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 sources to do ourselves. What actually impressed me was that they took the time to grasp the issue – and even reshape the character of their assist based on 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 international demand for chips, largely fueled by the explosion of AI.
In my opinion, it’s vital to strengthen our provide chains within the West – the pendulum has moved too far offshore growing dangers, with vital safety implications. Intel has been a powerful advocate and investor in addressing these considerations, constructing new wafer fabrication services and increasing current ones within the US and Europe.
Nevertheless, with dangerous actors more and more focusing on vital infrastructure, the business should undertake a world-class safety posture. This implies steady modernization of our know-how infrastructure, implementing strong “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI challenge – to guard these important belongings and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing in opposition to subtle threats.
Learn extra:
IT@Intel Whitepaper: Remodeling 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 identical knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.
