The Benefits of Optimization Now
Technology in the hardware and data center space moves incredibly fast. Only a few years can see the introduction of transformative improvements.
Even just a few generations can see rack consolidation levels of 3:1 or better1, and over 4x higher throughput2. This means that hardware refreshes aren’t just able to unlock marginal gains—they can dramatically reduce costs, accelerate innovation, and improve sustainability.
The Benefits of Optimization: Reduced Costs
Older infrastructure is expensive to maintain, consuming more power and taking up more space. You can lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) with more energy- and space-efficient upgrades.
Upgraded infrastructure offers greater flexibility that is often not possible—or comes with extra costs—on legacy data center infrastructure. Optimization helps reduce cost overruns by giving you greater visibility and control over resource allocation.
With many organizations overspending on cloud services
by as much as 70%3, infrastructure optimization can reduce TCO by 77%.
The Benefits of Optimization: Accelerated Innovation
AI, real-time analytics, and other advanced workloads can’t reach their potential without the computational power of modern, optimized hardware. In the worst case, businesses may even be unable to support modern workloads or use cases.
Our partnership with VMWare enables you to run accelerated AI inference workloads using your CPU instead of purchasing a discrete GPU, while still hosting your traditional apps on the same platform.
VMware's software-defined hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), is optimized for Intel® hardware, delivering enhanced performance and scalability for AI workload optimization and digital transformation at scale.
The Benefits of Optimization: Smarter Security
95% of businesses have faced a cloud security breach in the last 18 months.4 In that context, being secure from malicious actors is paramount. Legacy systems lack the security features needed to combat today’s cyber threats.
Optimizing your infrastructure enables you to take advantage of the latest security capabilities and updates to reduce your potential attack surface.
Optimization also opens the door to more data-driven opportunities and insights, helping you to remove potential vulnerabilities proactively and manage data compliance and confidentiality.
The Benefits of Optimization: Improved Sustainability
Data centers are using more power than ever, now accounting for up to 1.5% of the world’s energy consumption.5
With the exponential growth in data collected from edge devices
and the growing size of datasets needed for AI-based discoveries, that number is only set to get higher.
Fortunately, the pace of change in hardware efficiency is more than keeping up. Optimization helps to reduce overall power consumption while also delivering increased performance—allowing for significant reductions in carbon footprint.
The Risks of Waiting to Optimize
While optimizing your data center infrastructure brings clear benefits, the decision to optimize your data center stack is often one that feels like it can afford to be delayed. After all, if you can wait another year, costs may decrease or new upgrades may become available. However, this is a gamble—especially right now.
With the rapid advancement of AI and resource-heavy workloads, having technical debt from delayed infrastructure upgrades has never been more costly. Organizations that retain legacy systems for too long face serious risks:
- Missed Opportunities: Outdated data centers that cannot scale to meet rising data demands can lead to a loss of competitive advantage and business agility.
- Performance Bottlenecks: The greater the gap between hardware and workload, the slower and more inefficient your business-critical applications become.
- Disruptive Downtime: Aging systems are more prone to failures, which can have a serious impact on productivity and customer trust.
- Security Threats: Delaying upgrades means missing out on modern security features, leaving your business at risk of falling victim to cyberattacks.
Choosing to refresh your data center infrastructure helps you to avoid these pitfalls, ensuring you stay ahead in a competitive market.
Optimization in Action: Real-World Results
Generative AI and Cloud Efficiency
Intel’s collaborations with cloud providers demonstrate the transformative potential of modernization. For instance, organizations shifting to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) powered by Intel® processors have achieved up to a 94% reduction in server count, enabling faster deployment of generative AI applications and AI workload optimization.6
Seamless Migration
With the end of support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012, many organizations face migration decisions. 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors ensure seamless transitions, delivering up to 3.2x faster backup times and 22% improved transaction performance.7
Why You Should Optimize with Intel
The latest Intel® Xeon® processors redefine what’s possible in modern data centers. These processors offer built-in accelerators tailored for AI, ML, and data analytics workloads, enabling organizations to achieve more with less. Some standout features include:
- AI Acceleration: Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX) and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions-512 (Intel® AVX-512) deliver up to 14x higher AI workload performance compared to older platforms.
- Improved Energy Efficiency: Optimized power management reduces cooling requirements, lowering both costs and environmental impact.
- Hardware-Based Security: Intel® Security Engines and Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) protect against emerging threats with hardware-based encryption and isolation.
- Future-Proof Flexibility: Built-in accelerators optimize diverse workloads, improving AI, HPC, and cloud-native performance.
- Rich Partner Ecosystem: Intel collaborates with a huge range of equipment manufacturers, cloud providers, and software vendors to help you leverage the latest innovations.