IT Best Practices: Intel Manufacturing factories rely on advanced technology for smooth 24/7 operation. Each factory includes two data centers with hundreds of servers to manage materials, equipment automation, process control, inventory, analytics, and more. Manufacturing IT recently built a separate and completely virtual integration environment for Intel’s Non-volatile Memory Solution Group (NSG) factory. This offered an opportunity to introduce Intel Optane SSDs as cache tier on I/O-intensive workloads to reduce the number of disk groups required. Whether running applications, websites, databases, file servers, or other services, storage performance is often the most important factor in delivering high-performing business solutions. And higher disk throughput is key to achieving performance. We targeted web, application, and database servers using common factory workloads and the results were outstanding. Testing revealed that two disk groups performed as well as three and write-intensive workloads performed even better. We compared automation system use cases involving defect analysis application servers and database servers on a virtualized platform with Intel Optane storage media against systems with NAND SSD (All-Flash) systems. With nearly 200 physical servers hosted in the integration environment, the results gave us confidence to virtualize most factory integration compute environments with servers that simulate the factory setting before applying changes in production.