White Papers

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois chose Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors for its 9,600-core “Abe” supercomputer, which offers academic researchers, businesses, and members of industry access to outstanding processing performance for solving a full range of science and business problems.  Read the case study.

A detailed return on investment analysis by Intel IT showed that we can reduce data center costs by refreshing all servers after four years.

Intel IT planned, engineered, and has begun deploying a virtualized business-computing production environment at several data centers, a rollout that will continue through 2008. The initiative has already confirmed anticipated virtualization benefits such as faster, more automated deployment. Intel is initially consolidating older servers running applications that are not mission-critical; but the company sees opportunities to achieve 16:1 consolidation ratios. This paper discusses the methodology used to achieve these results.  

Intel IT compared the performance of two and four processor-socket servers in a virtualized environment.  This virtualization benchmark study examined server performance, total cost of ownership and scalability for a variety of deployment scenarios.

Intel IT developed a unique standardized threat agent library (TAL) that provides a consistent, up-to-date reference describing the human agents that pose threats to IT systems and other information assets. The TAL quickly helps risk managers identify accurately and understand the importance of relevant threat agents. The library consists of 22 standardized archetypes defined using eight common attributes; the archetypes represent external and internal threat agents ranging from industrial spies to untrained employees. The library is designed to overcome the lack of standard threat agent definitions and the problem that threat information is often fragmented and sensationalized.   This white paper discusses the process Intel used to develop the TAL, and also includes a current library of threat agents and their defining attributes.

Intel conducts ongoing evaluations of emerging compute models for enterprise operations. This white paper presents results from Intel IT’s Software as a Service (SaaS) and client virtualization evaluations. The study explores client, server and network utilization performance and presents benchmarks of results.

This study from Intel IT shows the Software as a Service (SaaS) approach of streaming to client systems offers many benefits for enterprise operations including reduced costs, simplified/centralized management, and improved patching penetration.

At a recent technology briefing, Intel discussed future products with four, six, eight and many computing cores coming to the market and revealed details around Intel’s multi-processor servers based on Intel’s 6-core processor codenamed “Dunnington” and Intel’s new Itanium® processor codenamed “Tukwila.”  These plus additional future technology insights are contained in this Intel Multicore Architecture Briefing document.

Although the final report has yet to be be released, this IDC executive summary white paper is available to Intel Premier IT Professional members for a period of time.  In it, IDC summarizes how virtualization is changing the landscape of the x86 IT world and how IT shops are the beneficiary of this rapid change and increase in performance and functionality.

E-mail is a great productivity tool, but it also has a darker side: e-mail overload. To deal with this problem, Intel has created a number of programs to help its employees use e-mail productively and efficiently. “Practice Smarter E-mail”, deployed in 2006/2007, is a lightweight, agile behavior change drive aiming to improve e-mail behavior in an organic organization with minimal investment of time and money.