Cloud Tools for Optimization and Management

Cloud tools from Intel provide performance optimization, resource management, and custom cloud migration recommendations to help you maximize the return from your cloud infrastructure.

Intel® Cloud Tools:

  • Intel provides a selection of cloud optimization tools to help optimize performance and reduce costs.

  • Intel® cloud tools provide recommendations for many popular cloud applications.

  • Cloud tools can take advantage of built-in features and accelerators for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor-based platforms.

  • Intel®-based cloud platforms include hardware-enabled support for performance acceleration and security.

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Support for Cloud Management

Whether you’re already running on cloud infrastructure, considering a “lift and shift” migration, or planning your cloud strategy, Intel provides you with a variety of cloud software tools to enable thorough evaluation, analysis, performance enhancement, and cost-effective resource management for a broad spectrum of cloud workloads.

Many of these cloud tools take advantage of hardware-enabled features in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and other Intel® processors and platforms to help further improve the price performance of cloud operations.

Three special-purpose tool sets that can be used for base-level cloud optimization include Intel® Workload Optimizer, Intel® Cloud Optimizer, and Intel® Migration Advisor.

Qualified Cloud Partners who are members of Intel® Partner Alliance: Cloud Insider Community can offer these Cloud Optimization tools to your customers.

Intel® Workload Optimizer

Placing and fine-tuning cloud workloads can be a challenge. Many cloud management platforms include workload optimization tools that enable more-efficient use of resources, often by moving each application to the cluster that supports its specific performance and cost requirements.

Intel works with software vendors and cloud service providers (CSPs) to offer access to Intel® platform technologies, such as Intel® Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost) and Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, through software stack integration.

Intel® Workload Optimizer by Granulate is an AI-enabled, automated solution that helps to enhance performance and reduce latency in cloud deployments. Intel partners with Granulate on the Intel® Workload Optimizer.

Mobileye, an Intel company, achieved 45 percent faster job completion and 44.5 percent cost reduction with no code changes after implementing the Intel® Workload Optimizer by Granulate in a hybrid cloud environment.1

Companies of all sizes are facing an increased demand for computing resources. The Intel® Workload Optimizer by Granulate helps maximize the use of computing resources while improving performance and reducing cost.”

—Asaf Ezra, CEO of Granulate

Intel® Cloud Optimizer

Excellent results can also be achieved by focusing on optimizations of the infrastructure. Intel® Cloud Optimizer by Densify deploys machine learning to analyze an organization’s range of cloud workloads automatically, matching them with platform and service combinations that are offered by the CSP.

Intel® Cloud Optimizer produces an ongoing series of recommendations that help organizations to adopt more cost-effective instance types or consolidate and optimize their contracts with CSPs, even if the organization’s purchasing processes are decentralized or fragmented. Intel® Cloud Optimizer is available from Intel on a subscription basis.

The Intel Cloud Optimizer by Densify recommends the best cloud instances running Intel® technology for your workloads—and only if they’re better than what you’re already using in terms of pricing, stability, or performance—balanced with whatever parameters are important to your business. This is a tremendous value, and Intel covers the cost.”

—Kevin Johnson, general manager, Intel Cloud and Enterprise Solutions and Technology Sales Group

Intel® Migration Advisor

Initial migration to the cloud is sometimes accomplished without sufficient planning. Once workloads are in place, they can continue to grow and multiply until the number and complexity of instances become unmanageable.

In large organizations, distributed growth of cloud instances can result in suboptimal performance and lack of cost control. It’s a challenge even to analyze the scope of cloud operations.

The Intel® Migration Advisor by CloudGenera addresses these organizational issues up front by automatically capturing and cataloging information about applications.

The vendor-agnostic cloud management tool analyzes all aspects of an organization’s cloud migration plan, across CSPs and including on-premises and off-site data centers. The tool then develops a scorecard-based report that recommends workload placements and optimal configurations. The resulting migration plan and business case are firmly grounded in data and are generated in minutes, rather than months.

CloudGenera’s workload placement engine can be deployed before, during, and after a cloud migration to audit the process and recommend price/performance improvements.

What would take months of manual research and spreadsheet analysis can be accomplished in minutes by tapping into CloudGenera’s data service and leveraging our cloud-rank algorithms. You can automate not just the mapping of your requirements to the best solutions in the market, but also to consider and evaluate ways you can change your implementation to achieve a much better outcome.”

—Brian Kelly, CEO of CloudGenera

Fast and high-quality application delivery models are the new standard of expectations in the cloud. This has led to major cultural changes within development and operations teams in creating a multidisciplinary role, DevOps. The Intel® Cloud DevOps Toolkit is based on years of multi-cloud engineering experience optimizing hardware and tuning software to achieve optimal price/performance across the world’s clouds.

The Intel® Cloud DevOps Toolkit is a suite of compilers, developer kits, code libraries, reference models, and training to enhance the performance of cloud instances and improve workload portability and cost optimization of your cloud environments.

The toolkit includes the following:

  • gProfiler from Granulate delivers always-on continuous workload profiling.
  • Intel® Data Center Performance Kit (Intel® DC PerfKit) is an automated framework for capturing workload performance on-premises and on IaaS cloud instances with leading CSPs that consolidates and recommends optimizations and tuning parameters.
  • Intel® Memory Latency Checker (MLC) is a tool used to measure memory latencies and bandwidth and how they change with increasing load on the system.
  • Intel® oneAPI base toolkit and libraries offer an open, unified programming model for development and deployment of data-centric workloads.
  • Intel® oneContainer portal is a centralized resource for third-party containers and related solutions, as well as Intel’s own tools, all optimized for Intel® architecture.
  • Intel® SKU Emulator understands workload performance on existing or new Intel SKUs (or public cloud instances).
  • Intel® System Health Inspector provides a system report on Intel-based server heal, configuration and microbenchmarks.
  • Intel® Telemetry Collector characterizes workloads to analyze and debug performance bottlenecks.
  • Intel® VTune™ Profiler optimizes application performance and system configuration for demanding solutions in HPC, IoT, media, storage, and other categories, both on-premises and in the cloud.
  • Intel® Xeon® processor performance tuning guides provide guidance on BIOS, operating system, workload, and benchmark settings to get the most out of your Intel® platform.
  • Intel® Workload Collocation Agent can be used to reduce interference between collected tasks and to increase task density while ensuring the quality of service for high priority tasks.
  • Intel® Workload Similarity Analyzer identifies workload similarities and offers configuration and tuning recommendations.

The Intel® Cloud DevOps Toolkit requires an Intel® Developer Zone account. Please contact sales@intel.com for access.

More Cloud Resources

A broad array of third-party applications in the cloud are already optimized for Intel® platforms. Whether these programs originate in the on-premises data center, colocated server farm, or cloud-native environment, those workloads can be migrated from one Intel® technology-based host platform to another without losing time on recoding or reporting.

Intel® DevCloud is a free virtual development sandbox to learn about and program with Intel® oneAPI cross-architecture applications. Develop, test, and run your workloads for free on a remote cluster of the latest Intel® hardware.

In addition to cloud tools and platforms, Intel provides compilers, developer kits, code libraries, reference models, and more, as well as training and support for the cloud journey.

Other software tools originate in the on-premises environment but can also be used to enhance the performance of cloud instances and improve workload portability. These tools include:

Cloud Management

Cloud management platforms from vendors like Microsoft, Red Hat, SUSE OpenStack, VMware, and Google Cloud can also offer visibility into a hybrid cloud model with a unified view of all workloads.

These platforms can make it easier to monitor costs, move workloads dynamically among clouds, and scale resources up or down as needed. Consolidated cloud management dashboards within those applications can also help to simplify policy control, automation, and information tracking.

Intel® Cloud Products and Solutions

Intel has been powering the cloud since 1998. Today, more than 15 million Intel® processor-based servers run workloads at major cloud service providers. Intel® platforms are nearly ubiquitous, and along with a vast ecosystem of software and hardware solutions, they provide a consistent, stable technology stack that helps to facilitate workload migration from edge to cloud.

Intel® products support cloud development and deployment in three key areas:

  1. Computing. Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost) can be combined with Intel® FPGAs and other accelerators to build workload-optimized Intel® Select Solutions for the cloud.
  2. Networking. Intel offers a range of Ethernet technologies and switches, as well as Intel® Secure Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) and its hardware-enabled security features.
  3. Storage. Intel® Optane™ persistent memory is designed for data-intensive applications and workloads. Persistent memory, or PMem, gives you access to more data and enables faster processing of large data sets. Unlike DRAM, PMem retains data even when powered off, which helps to prevent data loss.

Get More from the Cloud with Intel

Cloud management can be extremely complex, as organizations seek to balance numerous requirements and meet or exceed performance expectations while controlling cost.

Initial and ongoing implementation must allow for flexibility and scalability to accommodate an organization’s needs in an unpredictable future.

To support these cloud journeys, Intel and its ecosystem partners offer a range of tools to help organizations evaluate, benchmark, and tune cloud implementations. These cloud software tools help to improve performance and reduce costs at all stages of cloud migration and operation.