Intel today announced a range of new technologies, investments and industry collaborations aimed at making it easier to deploy scalable clouds using new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 processor family and solid state drives based on SSDs 3D NAND chips. "Enterprises want to benefit from the efficiency and agility of cloud architecture and on their own terms - using the public cloud offerings, deploying their own private cloud, or both," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. "The result is pent-up demand for software-defined infrastructure. Intel is investing to mature SDI solutions and provide a faster path for businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of the cloud."

Software-defined infrastructure (SDI) is the foundation for the most advanced clouds in the world. It makes the delivery of cloud services faster and more efficient by dynamically allocating the required compute, storage and network resources through intelligent software, orchestrating the delivery of applications and services on-demand and across many users.

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family, built on 14nm process technology, provides the key ingredients for SDI including Intel Resource Director Technology, which enables Intel's customers to move to fully automated SDI-based clouds with greater visibility and control over critical shared resources like processor caches and main memory.

Product Family Overview

• Up to 22 cores and 44 threads per socket
  
• Up to 55 MB of last-level cache (LLC) for fast access to frequently used data
• Up to 24 DIMMs per two-socket server to support multiple VMs
• Faster maximum memory speeds than the previous generation (DDR4 2400 MHz versus 2133 MHz)
  
• Intel Turbo Boost Technology with improvements when running mixed AVX workloads takes advantage of power and thermal headroom to increase processor frequencies across a wide range of workloads
• Improved virtualization performance, including lower latencies when entering and exiting VMs, less VM interrupts via posted interrupts, and page modification logging, which can be used for rapid VM check pointing
• Intel TSX instructions take advantage of hidden parallelism to accelerate OLTP and other multi-threaded workloads that experience bottlenecks due to memory locks
• Intel AVX2 instructions accelerate floating point and integer computations with support for 256-bit vectors. This technology can increase peak floating point operations by up to 31 percent, and is now optimized for mixed workload environments
• The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family is Intel?s first processor within the Intel Scalable System Framework

Intel says that the new product family delivers improved performance for cloud tasks with more than 20 percent more cores and cache than the prior generation, supports faster memory, and includes other integrated technologies for accelerating a wide range of server, network and storage workloads. Security enhancements like workload isolation, security policy enforcement and faster cryptography have been added to help protect data more effectively.

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family will be offered with 27 different server SKUs - including embedded and communications usage - which range in price from $213 to $4,115 in quantities of 1,000.

For fast and reliable data access to the cloud, Intel unveiled new solid state drives (SSDs) optimized for the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 family, enterprise storage and cloud deployments.

The DC P3320 Series has been optimized for cost-effective performance and is targeted at read-intensive applications in cloud and data analytics. With a PCIe Gen 3x4 interface, the DC P3320 delivers up to 5 times faster performance and up to 3.2 times faster sequential reads over mainstream SATA SSDs, such as the Intel SSD DC S3510.

The SSD has a random read speed of 365,000 input-output per second, which is five times faster than the company's older SSD DC S3510. The random write speed is 22,000 IOPS, which is 1.4 times faster. The sequential read speed is up to 1600 megabytes per second, 3.2 times faster, and the write speed is 1,400 megabytes per second, which is 3.1 times faster.

The price for the SSDDC P3320 wasn't immediately available, and it will ship in the second quarter.

The Intel SSD DC P3520 Series will deliver significant performance and latency improvements over the DC P3320, making it well-suited for applications in cloud computing environments that require higher levels of performance, such as storage virtualization and web hosting.

These new 3D NAND storage offerings also make Intel SSDs more of an affordable option when deploying multiple NVMe storage arrays that need to process large sets of data.

The Intel SSD DC D3700 and D3600 Series are Intel's first dual-port PCIe SSDs. They are designed for mission-critical cloud and enterprise storage solutions that demand 24 hours a day, seven days a week accessibility, and failover recovery.

To ensure data is accessible at all times and without interruption, the DC D3700 and D3600 Series feature an active/active dual-port design that connects to two host systems simultaneously. This simultaneous connection allows run-time recovery during failover when one of the hosts is unavailable.

Intel says that systems using the D3700 can see up to a 6-times increase in performance over today's dual-port SAS solutions.

As the first Intel drive to support NVMe specification 1.2 implementation, the DC D3700 and D3600 Series offers features designed specifically for high-availability storage, including Dynamic Multiple Namespaces Management with Reservations, scatter/gather IO list (SGL) support, consistently high IOPS and throughput with sustained low latency, power-loss data protection with self-test and thermal throttling and monitoring.

Those SSDs have random read speeds of up to 470K IOPS, which is 3.9 times faster than comparable dual-SAS drives, and random write speeds of 95,000 IOPS. The sequential read speed is 2,100 megabytes per second, which is 1.8 times faster, and write is 1,500 megabytes per second, which is two times faster.

Designed for smaller enterprises and small- to medium-sized businesses, the new Intel SSD DC S3100 Series is Intel?s first three-level cell (TLC) SATA SSD for the data center.

Designed for a range of devices from Ultrabook systems to desktops and laptops, the Intel SSD 540s Series delivers a low-power storage solution that also meets the performance, quality and reliability requirements demanded by today's consumer devices. The SSDs utilize a combination of single-level cell (SLC) cache and TLC NAND to offer abalance of performance and value. It is available in both the 2.5-inch and M.2 form factors and has storage capacities ranging from 120GB to 1TB.

The Intel SSD Pro 5400s Series meets a wide range of business client needs by offering high performance as well as enhanced security and manageability, including support for the Trusted Computing Group's Opal 2.0 protocol and Microsoft eDrive.

It is available in both the 2.5-inch and M.2 form factors and has storage capacities ranging from 120GB to 1TB.

Last but not least, the Intel SSD E 5400s Series and Intel SSD E 5410s Series are the first in a new family of SSDs that are targeted at embedded and IoT applications. With flexible form factors and capacities that range from 48GB to 180GB, the Intel SSD E 5400s Series is targeted at applications such as smart signage, ATMs, point-of-sale devices and more.

For applications requiring additional power loss protection, Intel SSD E 5410s Series integrates Power Loss Imminent (PLI) technology to significantly reduce the possibility of data loss during a power failure.

As part of the Intel Cloud for All initiative, Intel is investing in others in the industry to accelerate SDI-enabled clouds, optimizing key technologies, and aligning the industry to drive the development of standards and cloud solutions.

• Intel is collaborating with CoreOS and Mirantis to bring together two of the most popular open source technologies to orchestrate container and virtual machine-based applications. The merging of these two technologies into a single solution will simplify choices for cloud operators to accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions.
• Intel and VMware announced a network of Centers of Excellence aimed at accelerating cloud deployments. The centers will drive custom optimizations, facilitate proof-of-concept testing and integrate cybersecurity best practices in collaboration with The National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Intel announced the world's largest cloud application testing cluster for applications "born in the cloud." The cluster will include more than 1,000 Intel Xeon processor-based server nodes designed to provide developers with the opportunity to test applications at larger scales and deliver the efficiency and portability of cloud native applications to businesses.
• Intel is expanding its Cloud Builders program to include SDI use cases and accelerate ecosystem optimization efforts. The new Storage Builders program also aims to accelerate the industry?s use of cloud-ready, next-generation storage solutions.