Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Intel Introduces Service Assurance from On-Chip Trusted Execution

Intel introduced a Service Assurance Administrator software solution to help the data center administrators improve the security and management of applications, including OpenStack deployments.


The Intel Datacenter Manager: Service Assurance Administrator (DCM: SAA) improves data center efficiency by ensuring workloads are running on a trusted infrastructure and meet performance expectations in multitenant environments. The idea is to leverage deep platform telemetry built in Xeon processors to gain service-level assurance.

Specifically, Intel said deep platform telemetry hardware in the processor and chipset allows its new software to offer reliable and efficient resource management across legacy devices in multitenant environments.

The Intel DCM: SAA telemetry capabilities also provide cloud service administrators with deeper insight into performance metrics between the infrastructure and application.

Key Features

  • Controller: Optimizes the allocation of data center resources by collecting deep platform telemetry data from compute node agents and using that information to place application on the best server for optimal performance and assigned trust.
  • Assured performance: As applications are provisioned in the OpenStack environment, a performance SLA is assigned to the application using an Intel DCM: SAA feature known as a Service Compute Unit (SCU). This SCU specifies the target performance for the application. Intel DCM: SAA then uses the hardware instrumentation to measure the delivered performance and adjust as needed.
  • Trust: Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) obtains a measurement of a server at the time it boots up. The measurement is then used to determine the types of applications that can run on that server, allowing applications to effectively specify the infrastructure trust requirements. 

http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/cloud/pdfs/DCM_SAA_Factsheet.pdf
http://www.intel.com