Intel IT’s Top 5 Reasons for Implementing Cloud

August 3, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is real inside Intel IT. In fact, it is one of our Top 3 Priorities this year (the other two are “consumerization” and security).  At Intel, our private cloud infrastructure as a service implementation is important because it means we can deliver a highly available computing environment that provides secure services and data on-demand to authenticated users and devices from a shared, elastic, and multi-tenant infrastructure.

Now you’re probably thinking, “sounds good, but so what?”  Well, let me explain.

As a result of our computing environment, Intel IT can deliver these business benefits to the corporation:

  • Agility: Server provisioning time dramatically reduced from 90 days to 3 hours, and is on a path to minutes.
  • Efficiency: Server consolidation ratios up to 20:1.  We reduced our server count from 100k to 75k.  In addition, we consolidated the number of data centers from 150 to 90.
  • Business Intelligence: We are able to measure what is used and report that back to business units.
  • Elasticity: Scaling resources based on user demand, as needed.

Finally, I mention the cost benefits of cloud last because it was the least important reason.

  • Cost: Our cloud investments have already paid for themselves AND returned $17M in cash savings (this does not include non-cash benefits like employee productivity).

We recognize that our most valuable resource is not our factories or process technology, but rather our employees. It was huge for us to get to a place where our engineers didn’t have to wait 3 months from when they had an idea to when they had the compute resources to develop that idea.

So, there you have it – a nice round list of 5.