Intel to Consolidate 133 Data Centers Down to 8

Published: November 7, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It wasn't that long ago when companies used to brag about the physical girth of the iron in their data centers and the processing power that they could bring to bear for their companies. The very difficulty of supporting a complex data center was in and of itself a limiting factor in business--those who could afford to support such a monstrous collection of machinery were the ones who could automate the most and therefore rule the business world.

Now, building and supporting a big data center--or multiple data centers, as is the case in the Global 2000--is seen as something of an embarrassment, and rightly so. IT vendors that preach the power efficiency of their iron as a means to try to get their customers to buy new gear have to also demonstrate that they are capable of consolidating. Hewlett-Packard was the first to brag about its data center consolidation project last year, and was followed by IBM and Sun Microsystems this year, who have also been consolidating data centers, virtualizing servers, and getting rid of footprints as a means of saving money on electricity for power and cooling and paying for real estate. Now it is chip maker Intel's turn.

Last week, Intel said that it would be consolidating 133 data centers that it operates globally down to eight data center hubs, significantly reducing the number of centers it has to maintain and giving it an estimated $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion in costs savings over the seven-year term of the project, according to Brently Davis, manager of Intel's data center efficiency initiative (launched a year ago) and a member of Intel's own IT staff. Intel is trying to get the project done earlier if it can--maybe by 2011 or 2012--which could ironically reduce the total amount of money it saves.

Davis explained in a blog posting--IT vendors are getting too lazy to talk to the press any more--that Intel is a computer-heavy organization that is spread all over the place. Intel has over 93,000 servers, over 3.8 PB of data, and over 137 TB of wide area network traffic. "Supporting this is a very challenging environment," says Davis.

But even more challenging is staring down the growth Intel would see in its data centers if it did not consolidate and virtualize. Davis says that based on current trends, if Intel just kept doing what it was doing, Intel would need more than 250,000 servers in the next couple of years.

Intel plans to consolidate data centers, virtualize its servers (using hypervisors and grid computing technologies), and standardize its data center operations. Apparently, one of the reasons why Intel has so many servers is that each data center has had its own operations. "We are probably sitting on a lot of servers that are old and past the four-year life cycle," says Davis. Upgrading these machines to multicore processors, with lots of density, and consolidating server images down is the key. Intel currently has a one-to-one ratio for servers and operating systems as it supports its 2,500 applications, and it wants to get a lot more density into the eight 300,000 square foot data centers that it plans to build.

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