Modernizing Chip Manufacturing: Intel IT's Journey with Cisco CX

[ad_1] Think about being on the moon; surrounded by a whole bunch of thousand ft2 of area. A lot of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling methods shifting issues from level A to B. The few folks round are sporting “bunny fits” [1] and masks. They appear like astronauts – they don't seem to be. You aren't in area, you're within the clear room of one in all Intel’s chip manufacturing amenities.

These amenities are subtle, 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 manufactured from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can value us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why a whole lot of these factories run for years with none downtime. However, our cutting-edge amenities require fashionable, state-of-the-art infrastructure, which creates a conundrum:

How do you modernize your infrastructure with zero-downtime?

This yr, my group gained the CX Buyer Hero of the Yr Award for our infrastructure modernization mission. 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 prospects 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 prospects’ mental property from dangerous actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.

Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the visitors circulate 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 wanted 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 strategy for controlling 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 information circulate between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI in all places, protecting each the manufacturing facility flooring and our information facilities, by open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate visitors inside the manufacturing facility flooring, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ instrument varieties, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West[2] visitors between the info middle and the manufacturing facility 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 complicated visitors flows, changing them into the EPGs and contracts important for our new ACI setting.

Supply: IT@Intel: Reworking Industrial Manufacturing with Software program-Outlined Networking whitepaper

Deploying with Confidence: The Crucial Position of Answer 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 Answer Validation Providers (which can be found by way of Skilled Providers) have been essential for us, permitting rigorous testing of all vital new capabilities earlier than they went stay.

Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing facility setting, with configurations and community part 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 World Community

Whereas having an award-winning deployment is an enormous win, this mission 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 performed earlier than being rolled out to the remainder of the factories worldwide.

We're presently deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally includes uplifting our swap and routing platforms to the newest Cisco Nexus know-how.

Automation will likely 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 world 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 rising dangers, with necessary safety implications. Intel has been a robust advocate and investor in addressing these considerations, constructing new wafer fabrication amenities and increasing current ones within the US and Europe.

Nevertheless, with dangerous 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 strong “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI mission – to guard these important property and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing in opposition to subtle threats.

Learn extra:

IT@Intel Whitepaper: Reworking Industrial Manufacturing with Software program-Outlined Networking

[1] Lab robes

[2] East-West visitors refers to community communication that happens laterally between servers, functions, or gadgets inside the identical information middle or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.