Intel

Help decrease commercial database licensing costs using Intel® Xeon® processors with high performance per core.

By upgrading to servers with a higher performance per core, Intel IT consolidated commercial database cores by 82%—significantly reducing licensing costs—with a six?month return on investment.

Intel’s business is driven by data and informed by data-driven decisions. Therefore, commercial databases are a critical component of Intel’s day-to-day operations, forming the backbone for hundreds of online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads, such as enterprise data warehouses, data analytics, and smart factory applications. It is crucial that Intel IT minimize database costs while providing business units with the database performance they require. That’s a constant balancing act.

Challenge:

Intel IT operates 50+ data center modules across 15 sites, which house over 464,000 servers. To support Intel’s critical business functions, while operating our data centers as efficiently as possible, we constantly evolve our data center strategy. We run Intel data center services like a factory, accomplishing change in a disciplined manner and applying breakthrough technologies, solutions, and processes. From 2010 to 2024, our data center strategy generated savings exceeding USD 11.41 billion. Our strategy provides a foundation for continuous innovation that will improve the quality, velocity, and efficiency of Intel IT’s services and Intel’s business.

Intel IT is leading efforts to enhance outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) operations. We have developed a confidential manufacturing infrastructure solution that protects sensitive data and intellectual property (IP) and is scalable to adapt to evolving demands and growth. Our efforts help ensure robust security and enable efficient management of increasingly complex manufacturing workloads. Our confidential manufacturing infrastructure solution is highly secure—it is approved for use with data that is classified as Intel Top Secret. We hope our confidential manufacturing infrastructure blueprint inspires other manufacturers to boost their organizations’ efficiency and security.

Managing Intel’s thousands of applications and millions of IT resources (such as identities, Domain Name System (DNS) records, accounts, certificates, VMs, databases, and more) requires capabilities beyond those found in commercially available application portfolio management (APM) solutions. We have developed a custom APM framework that strictly gates the provisioning of new resources used by applications. Our goal is to provision IT resources only when an application is correctly registered and the resources are linked to a specific application. This approach to APM helps enable cost savings, creates more efficient application and resource lifecycle management, and reduces security and compliance risk.

Intel IT’s agentic GenAI platform called One AI uses open-source tools to consolidate siloed chatbots into a single, unified agentic AI platform. Although it has a single user interface, each specialized agent addresses a unique business use case and chooses the most effective large language model (LLM) for its task. Intel’s Sales and Marketing group is already using the One AI platform; we plan to scale the platform to embed GenAI into business processes to improve Intel’s productivity. One AI enables us to simplify agentic AI deployment and maintenance, drive cost and resource efficiency, and quickly deliver new GenAI use cases.

As part of our regular PC refresh cycle, we are deploying AI PCs, which are powered by an eXtensible processing unit (XPU) architecture that integrates multiple types of processing units (such as CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs). We chose to begin deploying AI PCs now to prepare for software applications’ ability to run various features on a GPU or NPU, which drains less power from the battery. Our tests indicate that an AI PC’s battery can last up to 3x longer than a non-AI PC during standard office tasks, with virtually no negative impact on performance or user experience.

Intel IT is modernizing our enterprise architecture (EA) to accelerate Intel’s business transformation. Our goal is to simplify processes, more tightly manage IT assets, and drive EA innovation through AI. Initiatives include establishing federated governance, formalizing evaluation of emerging technologies, increasing EA resiliency, infusing various forms of AI into our EA workflows, and using capability-based planning to prioritize and optimize capability evolution. Our new approach to EA will reduce technical debt, improve business agility, and support Intel’s strategic growth imperative.

Intel is entering a new era, with Intel Product and Intel Foundry as separate business entities. Through activities such as accelerated adoption of AI capabilities, data transformation, and ongoing modernization of factory and data center alike, Intel IT plays a pivotal role as a resilient change agent. We are aligning IT investments and initiatives with Intel’s strategic business objectives and are building resilience into our IT systems, processes, and organizational culture to support enterprise-wide resilience.

This year’s Intel IT Annual Performance Report chronicles Intel IT’s recent efforts and achievements within four categories: enabling the business to thrive, driving operational excellence, delivering an amazing employee experience, and shaping a resilient workforce.

The report includes an opening letter from our CIO, Motti Finklestein, and numerous success stories. Here is just a sampling:

Read the entire APR for the details of these stories and more.

Modern electrical grids incorporate redundancy and automated rerouting to maintain a reliable electrical supply during equipment failures or natural disasters. Plants have coping mechanisms to deal with adverse conditions like drought. Similarly, it is important that IT systems, including applications, infrastructure, platforms, and services, can withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. Resilient technology helps companies thrive, and when disruptions occur, enables them to emerge stronger than before.

In 2024, Intel IT launched our OneIT Resiliency Program, geared to instill resiliency across technologies, operations, and culture and organizational entities. In addition to defining these three pillars, we codified resiliency through a unique combination of framework, principles, standards, maturity model, and roadmaps. We focused first on applications, closing 100% of all resiliency gaps in Tier 1 applications by the end of the year. We also successfully weathered a major incident caused by one of our security software vendors: Despite widespread PC failure across the company, we restored functionality in just a few hours for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications and under 1.5 days for all applications at Intel.

During 2025, we will extend our efforts to infrastructure and data centers. We hope that our resiliency framework, standards, blueprints, recipes, and maturity model will inspire other IT departments to pursue a similar path to IT—and enterprise—resilience.

Intel’s manufacturing landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by digital transformation and automation. Intel’s manufacturing facilities generate vast amounts of data that must be efficiently processed, analyzed, and secured to optimize operations and maintain competitiveness.

In 2013, we deployed an “ultra” data warehouse that replaced our older fragmented and siloed databases. It has stood the test of time, easily scaling as we added yet more data and data domains. As Intel transitions to a foundry model, its factories will become more complex and will generate even more data than before. Plus, security is becoming even more critical—Intel must not only protect its own manufacturing data from unauthorized access; it must also ensure that Intel Foundry customers have confidence that their data is in safe hands and guaranteed to be separate from Intel’s data. We have implemented process-specific security (PSS), which helps prevent unauthorized data access while still delivering efficient query execution.

Our highly secure and high-performance data warehouse, running on modern Intel architecture, helps unlock important insights hidden in massive manufacturing data volumes. This solution has shown that it can reliably scale to handle not only today’s data challenges but also grow with Intel as it expands its factories to support its foundry model and IDM 2.0.