Intel Select Solutions for uCPE is a project we’ve undertaken earlier this year and have recently gone live with the PR. (Please read more about ISS if you’re interested (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-select-solutions-overview.html ). Intel Select Solutions is billed as “workload optimized” and “simplifies deployment.” This has shined a spotlight on where we could improve our process. While we started the project for the marketing potential of such verification, but it becomes apparent to us through the testing process that we could better integrate performance testing and the workloads our customers may run on their system.

This is a departure from our previous benchmarking focused test workflow and exactly what we needed to elevate above being “another ODM.” We have to understand customer workloads and know how to optimize systems for that. Customers’ requirements come in all shape and sizes, and they will all need to be able to deploy quickly. We see this as the key differentiator above and beyond providing a solution. This is the rebirth of our NFVI performance team.

So here is a belated introduction of our team. As mentioned above, our focus is NFVI and performance optimization. We have integrated many experts in different fields into a multidisciplinary optimization workflow. We’re tasked with many exciting projects that we hope that can be announced in the near future, as well as optimizing our hardware platform against a variety of infrastructure software. Playing with these software gives us new avenues to fine tune our systems and apply these experiences for our increasingly diverse customer requirements.

We have learned a few new tricks about tuning BIOS & DPDK compiler tuning through repeated testing and tweaking. If you read our previous blog regarding tuning GPU servers for better performance, that project benefitted from our improved process. Even when we aren’t working on projects that directly translate to customer software stack, we’re building a library of tweaks into our organizational knowledge that can be leveraged by all our customers. For customers wanting to use software we’ve optimized for, we can offer a quick path to get the systems up and ready to be put into service.

We are genuinely excited about the projects we’re currently working on and we hope you’ll stick around and follow our progress.