Intel refrigerators fail to thrill

THE AFTERNOON INTEL keynote yesterday was not the most scintillating of the bunch, it was about enterprise level topics, business transformation, challenges, consolidation and large platforms. There were some cool toys, that is for sure, but from the seats we were in, they looked mostly like refrigerators.

Deborah Conrad started it out talking about the new era of business transformation. Things like using mobile technology and service oriented architectures to change how your workers work, presumably for the better. For those of us not in that position, it was a little less than exciting. On the upside, the people who oohed and aahed were obviously ones to avoid at the cocktail parties.

Deborah gave way to Prasad Rampalli, talking about the four CIO challenges coming up. Re-architecture and operations automation was the first thing. It is about how to change your existing IT setup to make room for modularity, automation, and virtualization. Hmm, that is much more interesting, things were looking up.

Automation is actually more interesting, and it is about the things that admins do every day, and take a lot of time. The more servers you have, the more little tasks you need to do. The more tasks you have to do, the more it costs, and that will start to impact how many servers you can buy. Intel doesn't like it when you don't buy servers, so its automation technologies will address this.

Next comes security, both from an attacks and compliance perspective. There isn't much to say here, attacks bad and expensive, no attacks good and happy. Intel has things to make attacks go away, so that is good.

Last came deployment issues. Again, if you are the type to see trends, the more it costs to deploy a server, the less servers you can deploy on a given budget. This is bad for Intel, and so they are looking to reduce those costs. Things like plug and play integration for servers rather than parts of servers is on the horizon. This will be a very good thing for data center workers.

All of this can be wrapped up in a nice little console, and overseen by a single person. Hopefully, no one will have to ever go near a computer again, and that will suit Intel just fine.

The last person to speak that Abhi Talwalker, but he had cool stuff, so it is out of the scope of this article. µ