Think about being on the moon; surrounded by lots of of thousand ft2 of area. 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 seem like astronauts – they aren’t. 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 pricey. In right here, we produce cutting-edge microchips, the place a single chip could be made from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can price us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why numerous these factories run for years with none downtime. Nonetheless, 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 crew gained the CX Buyer Hero of the 12 months Award for our infrastructure modernization venture. 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 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 dangerous actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.
Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the visitors circulate 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 Utility 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 knowledge circulate between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI all over the place, masking each the manufacturing facility flooring and our knowledge facilities, via 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 sorts, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West[2] visitors between the info heart and the manufacturing facility flooring, offering essential 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 advanced visitors flows, changing them into the EPGs and contracts important for our new ACI atmosphere.
Deploying with Confidence: The Vital Function of Resolution Validation Companies
Given the unforgiving nature of our factories, after we deploy new capabilities in a manufacturing facility, we need to guarantee issues will work proper the primary time round. This is the reason Cisco’s Resolution Validation Companies (which can be found through Skilled Companies) 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 facility atmosphere, with configurations and community element 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 an enormous win, this venture 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 at present deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally entails uplifting our change and routing platforms to the newest Cisco Nexus know-how.
Automation might be a key enabler, and Cisco CX helps us with that. In Oregon, CX introduced in consultants 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 assist in line 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 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 growing dangers, with vital safety implications. Intel has been a robust advocate and investor in addressing these considerations, constructing new wafer fabrication amenities and increasing present ones within the US and Europe.
Nonetheless, with dangerous actors more and more concentrating on essential infrastructure, the trade 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 venture – to guard these important property 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, purposes, or gadgets inside the similar knowledge heart or, on this case, manufacturing facility community.
