Intel is known for small component parts like smartphone chips, but the storage division is one aspect of its business infrequently discussed. In an interview with Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick at IBM Edge, Andrea Nelson, Director of Storage for Intel, talked about the current state of the company’s storage division, its conversion from RISC, open source contributions and its future.

Nelson explained that the storage group at Intel is currently working on influencing Intel’s standard server CPUs to include features and functionality that provide data security in the performance for storage workloads. She also mentioned that at the end of 2011, the company announced 80 percent of new storage systems were shipping based on Intel architecture converting over from RISC, spurred by growing demand for greater compute power.

Vellante then brought up the fact that other organizations converting from RISC found there’s a massive ecosystem and software development capabilities. He asked Nelson about the role Intel played in terms of catalyzing that. Nelson said Intel works broadly with the storage ecosystem, including BSD and Linux, and also works with customers like Microsoft to optimize the software around IA. She added that there are a lot of new startups coming to fruition utilizing BSD and Linux and, as a result, there’s going to be key storage features innate in those boxes.

Nelson mentioned one example being Xeon platform’s Asynchronous DRAM Refresh (ADR), a hardware pin that connects and protects the system in case of a power failure. These drivers are included in the Linux and BSD offering, making it easier for customers to bring their products to market.

Open Source for Storage

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Intel’s software-defined storage team is working with OpenStack on optimization because there’s a big need, as well as Ceph, for block storage. These open source platforms don’t have the enterprise capabilities to be picked up and adopted broadly today, which is why Intel is putting a lot of effort and work into them.

The company is going to contribute an erasure code technology in Swift for the distributed object store. Intel is both writing and contributing code to the open source community, and also helping customers with implementations and optimization. As one of the top contributors to Linux for many years, Intel will be setting up and driving a similar effort to OpenStack, while also contributing to OpenFlow and other networking protocols.

Software-defined Storage

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Concluding the interview, Vellante asked Nelson to offer some insight on what’s to come with Intel’s storage business. She said that the company is focusing in on software-defined infrastructures and software-defined storage. Intel is looking at the orchestration layer in the software-defined storage controller and making sure that it is optimized and ready for enterprise consumption.

See the entire segment below.