Think about being on the moon; surrounded by tons of of thousand ft2 of area. Many of the exercise you see is robotic – automated material-handling programs transferring issues from level A to B. The few folks round are carrying “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 one in all Intel’s chip manufacturing amenities.
These amenities are refined, managed environments the place disruptions are extraordinarily expensive. In right here, we produce cutting-edge microchips, the place a single chip will be made from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can price us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why plenty 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 12 months, my group received 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 develop into a “foundry” for the semi-conductor market, opening our amenities to exterior prospects 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 prospects’ mental property from unhealthy actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.
Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the visitors stream 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 Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This allowed us to maneuver to a extra fashionable, streamlined method 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 device units, exactly controlling knowledge stream between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI in every single place, overlaying each the manufacturing unit flooring and our knowledge facilities, by means of open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate visitors inside the manufacturing unit flooring, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ device sorts, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West[2] visitors between the information middle and the manufacturing unit flooring, offering vital 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 atmosphere.
Deploying with Confidence: The Vital Position of Answer Validation Providers
Given the unforgiving nature of our factories, after we deploy new capabilities in a manufacturing unit, we need 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 vital for us, permitting rigorous testing of all vital new capabilities earlier than they went reside.
Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing unit atmosphere, 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 International Community
Whereas having an award-winning deployment is a giant win, this mission 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 executed 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 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 assets to do ourselves. What actually impressed me was that they took the time to know the issue – and even reshape the character of their assist in accordance 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.
In my opinion, it’s vital to strengthen our provide chains within the West – the pendulum has moved too far offshore rising dangers, with essential safety implications. Intel has been a powerful advocate and investor in addressing these considerations, constructing new wafer fabrication amenities and increasing present ones within the US and Europe.
Nonetheless, with unhealthy actors more and more focusing on vital infrastructure, the trade should undertake a world-class safety posture. This implies steady modernization of our expertise infrastructure, implementing strong “protection in depth” methods – like our ACI mission – to guard these very 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 visitors refers to community communication that happens laterally between servers, functions, or gadgets inside the similar knowledge middle or, on this case, manufacturing unit community.
