Photo courtesy of Intel

There’s a definite shift in the datacenter, a trend that’s forcing companies to rethink architecture and applications across the stack.  For Intel it’s been quite a journey, but one the chip maker was prepared for.  During the Intel Developer Forum last month SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier interviewed David Tuhy, the general manager of Intel Storage Group, to learn more.

Tuhy says that his unit and the surrounding ecosystem are witnessing three major trends today: the cloud, big data, and high-performance computing (HPC). He notes that Intel spends 13 percent of its revenue on R&D, which helped put his company is a very good position to monetize this shift in the data center.

Furrier concurs, citing the company’s growing presence in the cloud as well as increased investments in embedded systems and big data.

Tuhy offers more details about how these trends are influencing his business in particular.  The Intel GM says that server virtualization is expanding to other parts of the data center, namely software and the network.

The executive divides the change in the storage paradigm to two different scenarios. On one end, there are the traditional enterprises that are starting to make use of the unstructured data sitting in their ERP systems and Oracle databases:  they’re doing this on spinning disk, while leveraging deduplication and compression to reduce physical infrastructure requirements.

Tuhy goes on to say that Intel’s highest performance CPUs are being put to use in these environments, but not exclusively.  His company’s chips also help power other CPU-intensive technologies such as flash-as-cache, which extends to the second scenario.

Organizations that are scaling towards big data are facing bottlenecks in storage – the spinning disk is getting bigger, but it’s not getting any faster. That’s why Intel is starting to use SSDs to bridge this gap.  Flash is facilitating a new type of architecture where one storage tier is located in the server, one in the network and another in the capacity store.

Tuhy’s expects that over the course of the next five to ten years, flash is going to change the way the way data is managed in the enterprise.  And Intel will be supplying the silicon that powers this transition.

Watch Tuhy’s entire interview below: