Smart Architectures, Architects (Continued)
Getting Maximum Utilization
Carter: Intel obviously is a chip company, and invests heavily in using your own processor technology in your IT infrastructure. How are you leveraging your hardware investments, and new technologies such as 64-bit computing?
Rampalli: Take a typical application development lifecycle pipeline where the application moves from the development box to the integration box, to the testing box, and finally to a production box. Once you get through the three production systems, the average utilization for these three boxes is 15 percent. But if you take a snapshot of these systems, you utilize the system by 100 percent during the integration test. Once you're past the integration, the integration box is not being used. The same thing is true in development, right? So when you average it out, the three production systems have about 15 percent utilization.
The question is, "How do I take this asset base and utilize it to get maximum utilization and the best TCO possible?" This is what's eating my lunch, right? The only way to get past that is what we call dynamic allocation of resources. In other words, I could take resources from the development box and utilize it for a testing process if it's sitting idle. The system knows it can grab CPU from there because it's idle. This is the notion of grid computing applied at a system level. This three-to-one consolidation of systems alone is a huge reduction to cost and TCO.
Carter: So you're an NT shop historically. Are you 100 percent focused on .NET, or are you incorporating [Sun Microsystems] Java as well in your enterprise?
Rampalli: Our ERP system runs on J2EE and J2ME, so yes, we have Java in there. But we are predominantly on Microsoft: .NET Framework to the core. We don't have any roadblocks in the assimilation of applications or services that are utilizing Java, however. We are essentially looking at Web services in a .NET framework.
Carter: So are XML Web Services ready for prime time? Is anything standing in the way of widespread deployment of Web services?
Rampalli: I am excited about Web services because of the open standards efforts in place there. I'm also a little cautious about their implementation in certain areas that aren't ready yet—I'm talking about the business-to-business space—because of security issues. In the Web services paradigm, we lack an encrypted authentication process in the environment.
Security is critical in the B2B paradigm because it's a machine-to-machine transaction. We believe that until we get security capabilities in place for the guaranteed delivery of the Web services message between two trading partners, we are not ready for using them outside Intel. Internally, however, we are gung-ho on implementing Web services. We've built consolidated Web services: a set of application servers that have been implemented to host all the integration code and to support the scalability of transactions going to this platform, the monitoring, the management, the security, and so on. The entire implementation of e-business Web services will be done on this single implementation.
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