The Case for

Orchestration
of Cloud
Infrastructure
How Intelligent and Automated Resource
Provisioning Enables Business Agility
SUMMARY
An agile business demands an agile infrastructure. Orchestration is a key
step toward an efficient, cost-effective, cloud-ready data center built on
software-defined infrastructure (SDI). Orchestration can reduce costs and
increase efficiency through intelligent, automated resource allocation across
your compute, storage, and network infrastructure. That means fewer human
touch points and faster, more efficient service deployment. Discover how
Intel® technology built into solution platforms from leading software vendors
and open-source developers delivers orchestration capabilities for SDI to
accelerate deployment of enterprise clouds.

THE CASE FOR ORCHESTRATION OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 2

DATA CENTER AS AN INNOVATION ENGINE
All CEOs share an imperative: Grow the business. Today
that means making the right investments in technology and
infrastructure that can drive business velocity.

More than ever, the C-suite is turning to technology to help

them get a leg up on their competitors. Businesses are searching
for ways to thrive in a world where cloud, data analytics, and
the Internet of Things are offering new opportunities to drive
revenue and evolve their business models.

What does it take for businesses to be able to capitalize on

these opportunities and bring viable ideas to market rapidly,
while fending off competitive threats?

The Need for a Modern Infrastructure

An agile business demands agile infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of enterprise data centers are
still running on static, proprietary, purpose-built systems that
limit flexibility and responsiveness. IT continues to be asked
to do more with less and hasn’t been able to truly deliver self-
service agility and multitenant services to their developers
and business users.

What’s missing is the capability to optimize operations

across the enterprise data center for compute, storage,
and networking to increase efficiency and leverage a cloud
architecture that provides the flexibility that businesses need
to innovate.
54% OF LINE-OF-BUSINESS
EXECUTIVES (NON-IT
DEPARTMENTS) BELIEVE THAT
THE IT GROUP IS AN OBSTACLE
TO THEIR MISSION.¹

to improve infrastructure As data centers increasingly

Moving Forward utilization, optimize serve a world of dynamic
• Predict potential issues early.
• Ensure proper workload
to SDI workload placement, applications, it is critical placement for SLA compliance.
accelerate application to manage and deliver the
Orchestration is a major performance, and provide right levels of performance
evolutionary step forward central data center and infrastructure capability
in data centers moving to oversight. to different classes of
SDI, where applications service offerings and
and the physical hardware Orchestration platforms associated service level
they run on are separated available in-market agreements (SLAs).
and entirely controlled by today enable policy-
software. SDI delivers the driven management and With orchestration, you can:
full promise of automated, movement of cloud-native
scalable, and self-service and legacy workloads • Connect and automate
infrastructure control across resource pools, workflows for specific services.
within your data center, aligning service requests • Manage configuration, capacity,
enabling agile delivery of with available resources metering, and chargeback.
cloud applications while and monitoring the • Track and report on
maximizing efficiency health of the physical and infrastructure and application
of workloads. In an SDI virtualized environment. performance and availability.
environment, orchestration Most importantly, the • Monitor system and 64% OF THOSE INDICATING
drives a high level of orchestration platform application health. THAT THEY WERE “EXTREMELY
intelligence across your data can accumulate learnings • Monitor security threats and SUCCESSFUL” WITH CLOUD
center with a policy engine that can help make better adherence to security policies. WERE CURRENTLY USING
that uses platform and decisions in the future. • Take effective actions. CLOUD ORCHESTRATION.²
application telemetry data
THE CASE FOR ORCHESTRATION OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 3
GAIN AGILITY WITH AUTOMATED PROVISIONING
Orchestration can reduce costs through intelligent resource
allocation across your compute, storage, and network
infrastructure. Because you are using software to automate
provisioning, management, and coordination of services
dynamically, you can often deploy services faster with fewer
human touch points.

Resources can be precisely provisioned—for example, with the

right capabilities in the right geographic areas. Orchestration
enabled across your SDI allows you to set global policies
that permit applications to engage the right type of storage
depending on access requirements, provision the right
networking levels to ensure network quality-of-service needs,
and ensure that CPU and memory resources are allocated as
needed based on application requirements.

Orchestration ultimately enables you to better manage

capacity by establishing the pathway to a cloud architecture
where you can control multiple workloads and institute policies
with required levels of security, performance, and governance
dynamically across on- and off-premises cloud resource pools.

30% ARE USING CLOUD

ORCHESTRATION AND 51%
PLAN TO WITHIN THE NEXT
12 MONTHS.²

of business as well as
Intel® Technology enterprise IT. Intel based
capabilities to manage
shared platform resources
applications run on trusted
servers and virtual machines
Foundation: platforms expose telemetry (such as L3 cache and system whose configurations have
data so automation tools
Silicon + Software and application software
memory) dynamically across
compute, networking,
not been altered. Integrity is
verified remotely using Intel
can make better decisions and storage. TXT and Trusted Platform
Intel’s silicon and software
about provisioning, Module (TPM) technology on
innovations are the
resource allocation, service • Intel® Trusted Execution Intel Xeon processors.
foundation of a growing
tiering, and quality-of- Technology (Intel® TXT)
portfolio of solutions that are
service levels to drive data (available in the Intel Xeon • Snap is an open-source
helping data centers move
center efficiency. processors E5 and E7 families) platform-telemetry
to SDI and dynamic, policy-
measures and verifies that framework that improves
based, on-demand services.
Key telemetry-related virtual servers boot into intelligent use of data center
technologies include: “known good states,” enabling infrastructure in cloud
Beyond workload-
security automation and environments by enabling
optimized silicon for
• Intel® Resource Director compliance monitoring. exceptional data center
SDI-based data centers,
Technology (Intel® RDT) scheduling and workload
Intel also offers key
(available in the Intel® • Intel® Cloud Integrity management through access
platform technologies
Xeon® processor E5-2600 Technology (Intel® CIT) to underlying telemetry
and software capabilities
v4 product family) provides works with the OpenStack* data and platform metrics.
that enhance the value of
orchestration and automation platform to ensure that cloud
Intel architecture to lines

THE CASE FOR ORCHESTRATION OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 4

FINDING THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Orchestration changes the way you manage your data center infrastructure. IT staff familiar with managing purpose-built
systems must shift their mind-set to running a broader software-defined domain of physical and virtual environments.
This ultimately provides a self-service application development environment that delivers line-of-business benefit from new,
cloud-native applications. If you are just beginning to map out your SDI strategy as part of your broader enterprise cloud
initiatives, you have a growing landscape of solution approaches and choices.

Software Platform Options Deployment Options—

Orchestration capabilities are available today across
Do-It-Yourself or Integrated
a broad array of hardware and software platforms. SDI Solutions
Intel has deep collaborations across hardware and
software vendors, ensuring optimization of a wide Once you’ve chosen your cloud platform,
range of enterprise-ready solutions. solution deployment presents two approaches
for moving forward.
If your IT environment supports VMware* or
Microsoft* platforms, consider building your SDI with • Do-it-yourself (DIY) approach. Build your SDI
their orchestration solutions. Your staff already has with discrete solutions available from the
domain expertise in these platforms, which helps you portfolio of various hardware and software
mitigate risks by implementing from a familiar source. vendors, including open source. This gives you
the flexibility that comes with an environment
If you’ve integrated open source into your data that is not defined by a single vendor.
center strategy, the OpenStack platform offers
rapidly maturing solutions to control data centers • Converged and hyperconverged solutions.
via open APIs and open interfaces, making it another Leading vendors and new entrants in the market
compelling option for building SDI solutions. Key today offer a simplified approach compared to DIY
vendors such as Red Hat and Mirantis provide solutions. With these solutions, you have the choice
OpenStack distributions optimized for Intel of all the software-defined components—compute,
architecture features and enterprise capabilities. storage, networking, and orchestration software—
in a single box. Integration is preconfigured and
To give you insight on deploying an SDI and help you prevalidated, providing a simplified approach
take advantage of orchestration capabilities, to SDI deployment today.
Intel® Builders offers solution briefs, proof-of-concept
publications, and reference architectures. Intel
Builders highlights the landscape of vendors and Intel
collaborations to help you move forward.

THE CASE FOR ORCHESTRATION OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 5

GETTING STARTED WITH SDI: A CHECKLIST
If you’ve decided to move to an SDI to enable cloud deployments, here’s a high-level checklist to help you get started.

Understand the business problem. Choose your platform.

Work with your business users. What is the business Do you want to run your SDI on vendor-specific
problem that SDI can help solve? Are there specific solutions or open source? Understand what you will
workloads that support key business initiatives that gain and trade off with both those approaches before
need to be moved to your cloud infrastructure once choosing your solutions.
you have it up and running? Are there new projects
that would benefit from the agility of self-service
Consider your deployment options.
infrastructure?
Do you want to build your SDI from a portfolio of
discrete solutions from different vendors so you
Assess which specific infrastructure subcategory
can customize to your needs, or opt for speed of
within your data center will benefit most from SDI.
deployment via converged and hyperconverged
Is your biggest IT need around lowering storage solutions?
costs? Or increasing efficiencies of legacy
applications? Or improving network security at its
Get educated.
core? Identifying your biggest pain point will help
you decide where to implement SDI principles for • Read white papers, research studies, and analyst reports.
maximum business impact.
•F
 ind out what other companies learned on their
SDI journey—build on best practices and avoid
Identify a pilot project.
common pitfalls.
Consider asking your DevOps group for a project they
•L
 ook for reference architectures of proven SDI
want to run on an on-premises cloud that solves a key
solutions from Intel Builders members.
business problem. Start small, build on key learnings,
and then expand your scope of cloud projects.

THE CASE FOR ORCHESTRATION OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE 6

Take the first steps with Intel based
platforms for software-defined
infrastructure.
Learn more about building your own
enterprise cloud at intel.com/cloud.
Find solution briefs, proof-of-concept
publications, reference architectures, and
vendor connections at Intel Builders.

Share with Colleagues

1 “State of the CIO 2015” (survey). CIO (January 5, 2015).

cio.com/article/2862760/cio-role/2015-state-of-the-cio.html#slide9
2 Open Cloud Management and Orchestration 2015: Adoption and Experiences. Enterprise Management Associates (June 2015).
researchandmarkets.com/research/7pkh48/open_cloud

Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software,
or service activation. Performance varies depending on system configuration. No computer system can be absolutely
secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer, or learn more at intel.com.

Copyright © 2016 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, the Intel. Experience What’s Inside logo,
Intel. Experience What’s Inside, and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
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