Think about being on the moon; surrounded by a whole lot of thousand ft2 of area. A lot of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling techniques transferring 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 area, you’re 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 state-of-the-art microchips, the place a single chip may be manufactured from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can value us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why quite a lot 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 crew 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 develop 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 unhealthy actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.
Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the site visitors movement 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 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 device units, exactly controlling knowledge movement between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI in all places, overlaying each the manufacturing unit ground and our knowledge facilities, by open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate site visitors inside the manufacturing unit ground, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ device varieties, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West(2) site visitors between the info middle and the manufacturing unit ground, 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 setting.
Deploying with Confidence: The Essential Position of Answer Validation Companies
Given the unforgiving nature of our factories, after we deploy new capabilities in a manufacturing unit, we wish to guarantee issues will work proper the primary time round. This is the reason Cisco’s Answer Validation Companies (which can be found by way of Skilled Companies) have been crucial for us, permitting rigorous testing of all vital new capabilities earlier than they went stay.
Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing unit setting, 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 crops remained safe and operational.
From Oregon to the World: Scaling to our International Community
Whereas having an award-winning deployment is a giant win, this undertaking 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 completed 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 entails uplifting our swap and routing platforms to the most recent 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.
For my part, 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 robust 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 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 important belongings and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing towards refined 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 gadgets inside the similar knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing unit community.
