Intel embraces SDN to modernize its chip factories

As extra semiconductor manufacturing springs up within the US, the usage of SDN additionally “turns into one of many key steps in digital transformation the place, on this case, a semiconductor producer can accumulate, handle, and use information holistically from the manufacturing unit flooring to past the community edge,” says Hughes, whose most up-to-date survey, IDC’s 2023 Way forward for Connectedness Sentiment, reveals that 41% of producers imagine that the flexibleness so as to add/change bandwidth capability in close to real-time is a high purpose for SDN/SD-WAN funding.

The survey additionally confirmed that 31% of producers say optimized WAN visitors for latency, jitter, and packet loss is one other high purpose for SDN/SD-WAN funding and is taken into account crucial for managing manufacturing unit flooring gear in real-time.

Intel has deployed SDN in roughly 15% of its factories thus far and can proceed emigrate current Ethernet-based factories to SDN. For brand spanking new implementations, Intel has chosen to make use of open supply Ansible playbooks and scripts from GitHub to speed up its transfer to SDN.

Intel licensed Cisco’s ACI answer in time to deploy in high-volume factories inbuilt Eire and the US in 2022 and for extra deliberate in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, Israel, Malaysia, Italy, and Germany within the coming years, in line with the corporate.

Intel’s core accomplice on the SDN venture is assured the advantages will proceed to have a large profit — even for an organization of Intel’s measurement.

“The largest profit is that SDN helped Intel full new manufacturing unit community builds with 85% much less headcount and weeks quicker by the usage of automated scripts,” says Carlos Rojas, a gross sales and enterprise developer who labored on the venture. “Automation and SDN allow higher scalability and consistency of safety and coverage controls, and the power to deploy micro-segmentation, enhancing Intel’s safety posture and decreasing assault surfaces.”