Big Data and the Cloud – Take the Lead or Be Disrupted

Intel is a company driven by Moore’s law and possessing a culture that eats, drinks, and breathes innovation; they are always looking ahead, continuously moving forward, and constantly pushing itself to the next level. This doesn’t happen by accident – it is driven by the mission of a company organized and managed by leaders who embrace the mission and strive to uphold it. Big Data was a key element of Kim Stevenson's keynote earlier in the day, and she provided Furrier with her own definition of the term: “Big Data is all information created (machine-generated and human generated) – all of this information fits into the Big Data envelope.” Stevenson, Vice President Information Technology Group CIO at Intel, added that “the important parts of Big Data are the pieces we have failed to contextualize in a systematic way up until now.”

Among other things, Stevenson shared two recent scenarios in which Intel’s bleeding-edge innovation is evident: both of which were rooted in the Cloud.

1) The first use case provided was that of an in-house virtualized office/enterprise application store for Intel employees in which Intel moved its office and enterprise application-provisioning services to an environment that is 75 percent virtualized and in the Cloud. “This allows us to provision our services in under an hour for all of our employees,” said Stevenson.

2) The second use case covered Intel’s product development and design engineer operations. Intel deployed a massive cloud-based compute infrastructure comprised of 50,000 servers hung together in a grid (aka a “clustered cloud”). “This implementation dramatically improves the throughput time for every engineering job that happens at Intel,” said Stevenson.

The video delivers an amazing exchange between the hosts and the speaker - it is well worth watching. Read the article and watch the video to experience the conversation for yourself.