Experience Intel® Rack Scale Design in WWT's ATC

Intel® RSD racks up new advances in scalability

A core mission at WWT is preparing our customers for the data deluge that's about to wash over them in our hyper-connected world.

From 5G wireless and optical networking to cloud processing and analytics, massive volumes of information are driving the need for a new infrastructure redesign. By 2020, the Internet of Things is expected to connect some 20 billion devices. Data centers will be tasked with leveraging all that connectivity to derive actionable insights through data analytics and machine learning.

The problem is, traditional data centers were never designed for such requirements. Instead, what's needed is a logical, scalable architecture that enables data centers to pool and distribute resources in real time. Now, Intel has introduced just such a solution and WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC) is among the first facilities to have it up and running.

Re-imagining a more scalable data center design

Intel® Rack Scale Design (Intel® RSD) is a revolutionary new architecture that's fundamentally changing the way data centers are built, managed and scaled out over time. Intel RSD disaggregates compute, storage and network resources, and connects them to form individual pods. These elements are abstracted into user-defined resource pools that can be managed through firmware and software APIs provided by Intel.

Pods can consist of multiple racks or of portions of a single rack. This allows RSD much greater agility and scalability as pods are deployed in many different ways. Modular resource pools enable organizations to purchase and deploy new capacity only as it's needed.

Intel RSD is built on the widely adopted open RESTful API standard, freeing end-users from being locked into a proprietary vendor solution. By basing solutions on open-sourced Intel RSD reference software, leading ecosystem players such as Dell EMC, HPE and Red Hat can provide additional innovation and differentiation beyond the API standard.

Envisioning the possibilities for Intel RSD

Intel RSD is an ideal complement to virtualization, cloud computing and other software-oriented approaches. It dynamically composes resources based on workload-specific demand. And, rack scale design provides the flexibility to quickly and dynamically configure customized systems.

Intel RSD holds great promise for IT environments as diverse as:

• DevOps organizations, helping enable software development and IT teams to build, test, and release software products faster and more reliably.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS), allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining infrastructure.
• Next-gen, cloud-native and scale-out apps that don't rely on classic IT infrastructure to provide services.
• Hosting services and cloud service providers that offer network services, infrastructure, or business applications in the cloud.

Intel RSD brings a logical architecture that's revolutionizing the data center, realizing important advantages in flexibility, manageability and cost savings. By transforming the way data centers are built, managed and expanded, Intel RSD enables them to be more economical, flexible, simpler to manage and easier to scale out on demand.

Beyond those advantages, rack scale design sets the stage for advanced analytics-based data center optimization solutions. And because Intel RSD is aligned with industry standards, users benefit from increased vendor choice and built-in future-proofing.

See Intel RSD at work, as well as other transformative data center technologies, in WWT's Advanced Technology Center, ground zero for integrating scalable solutions, hyperconverged systems, public and private clouds, edge computing and other next-gen data center innovations yet to emerge.