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 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 house, you’re within the clear room of one in every of Intel’s chip manufacturing amenities.
These amenities are refined, managed environments the place disruptions are extraordinarily pricey. In right here, we produce state-of-the-art microchips, the place a single chip could be made from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can value us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why plenty of these factories run for years with none downtime. Nonetheless, our cutting-edge amenities require trendy, state-of-the-art infrastructure, which creates a conundrum:
How do you modernize your infrastructure with zero-downtime?
This yr, my staff received the CX Buyer Hero of the 12 months 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 out to be a “foundry” for the semi-conductor market, opening our amenities 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 1000’s 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 would have liked a whole re-architecture.
In collaboration with Cisco, we determined to undertake Cisco’s Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This allowed us to maneuver to a extra trendy, streamlined method 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 move between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI in every single place, masking each the manufacturing unit flooring and our knowledge facilities, via open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate site visitors inside the manufacturing unit 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 unit flooring, offering essential deep packet inspection.
Crucially, the migration of those 1000’s of VLANs was a monumental process, 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 Crucial Function of Answer Validation Providers
Given the unforgiving nature of our factories, once we deploy new capabilities in a manufacturing unit, we wish to guarantee issues will work proper the primary time round. Because of this Cisco’s Answer Validation Providers (which can be found by way of Skilled Providers) had been essential for us, permitting rigorous testing of all important new capabilities earlier than they went reside.
Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing unit surroundings, with configurations and community part 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 crops remained safe and operational.
From Oregon to the World: Scaling to our World Community
Whereas having an award-winning deployment is a giant 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 present deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally includes uplifting our change 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 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 help in accordance with 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.
For my part, 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 amenities and increasing current ones within the US and Europe.
Nevertheless, with unhealthy actors more and more focusing on essential 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 challenge – to guard these important belongings 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 site visitors refers to community communication that happens laterally between servers, functions, or gadgets inside the identical knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing unit community.
