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

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 transferring issues from level A to B. The few folks round are carrying “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 every of 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 may be made from 28 billion transistors. One hour of downtime can price us as much as $5M in income loss, which is why quite a lot 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 group gained 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 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 dangerous actors’ more and more elaborate safety threats.

Traditionally, we relied on Digital Entry Management Lists (VACLs) to handle the visitors circulation 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 visitors flows utilizing Endpoint Teams (EPGs) and Contracts. This new mannequin allows us to create granular safety insurance policies and apply them to particular instrument units, exactly controlling knowledge circulation between them. Whereas our preliminary thought was to implement ACI in every single place, protecting each the manufacturing unit ground and our knowledge facilities, by way of open, clear discussions with Cisco we pivoted towards a hybrid mannequin: ACI now manages the intricate visitors inside the manufacturing unit ground, securing our 2,700+ VLANs and 1,100+ instrument sorts, whereas firewalls deal with the East-West[2] visitors between the information heart and the manufacturing unit ground, offering crucial deep packet inspection.

Crucially, the migration of those 1000’s of VLANs was a monumental activity, 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 surroundings.

Deploying with Confidence: The Vital Function of Answer Validation Companies

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. This is the reason Cisco’s Answer Validation Companies (which can be found through Skilled Companies) have been crucial for us, permitting rigorous testing of all important new capabilities earlier than they went dwell.

Cisco constructed a lab that mirrors our manufacturing unit surroundings, 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, guaranteeing our manufacturing vegetation 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 challenge 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 completed earlier than being rolled out to the remainder of the factories worldwide.

We’re presently deploying ACI throughout all our factories worldwide, which additionally entails uplifting our swap and routing platforms to the newest Cisco Nexus expertise.

Automation shall 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 grasp the issue – and even reshape the character of their assist in line 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 crucial to strengthen our provide chains within the West – the pendulum has moved too far offshore growing dangers, with essential safety implications. Intel has been a robust advocate and investor in addressing these issues, constructing new wafer fabrication amenities and increasing current ones within the US and Europe.

Nevertheless, with dangerous actors more and more focusing on crucial 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 challenge – to guard these very important property and guarantee uninterrupted manufacturing in opposition to refined 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, purposes, or units inside the identical knowledge heart or, on this case, manufacturing unit community.