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Virtualisation: Ally for Companies Looking to Gain Energy Efficiencies in Their Data Centers
Brad Gray
Brad Gray holds the position of Vice President, Asia South Pacific, at Juniper Networks’ operations in Singapore. His responsibilities include driving all Juniper’s sales activities, spearheading growth within the region, overseeing technical operations and developing new business opportunities.
Having over eleven years’ experience in data networking and seven years being based in South Asia, Brad comes equipped with a strong understanding of the enterprise and carrier market in Asia.
Brad began his Asian career with Bay Networks which has since then been acquired by Nortel Networks. As its Country Manager in Indonesia, highlights of Brad experience there include the installation of the two national Internet infrastructure projects for Telkom Indonesia ‘TelkomNet’ and POS Indonesia (The Indonesian Post Office) ‘Wasantara’.
Later as 3Com’s Country Manager and Head Representative in Indonesia, Brad helped the company to expand its Indonesian operations, as well as its market share in the Small, Medium and Large Enterprise sectors, and the Carrier market.
Prior to joining Juniper Networks, Brad was Vice President, Asia South Pacific, at Unisphere Networks. He expanded the company’s presence in the region by establishing offices in Australia and India, and firmly established Unisphere Networks as a key partner within the region’s next-generation broadband service provider community.
Having over eleven years’ experience in data networking and seven years being based in South Asia, Brad comes equipped with a strong understanding of the enterprise and carrier market in Asia.
Brad began his Asian career with Bay Networks which has since then been acquired by Nortel Networks. As its Country Manager in Indonesia, highlights of Brad experience there include the installation of the two national Internet infrastructure projects for Telkom Indonesia ‘TelkomNet’ and POS Indonesia (The Indonesian Post Office) ‘Wasantara’.
Later as 3Com’s Country Manager and Head Representative in Indonesia, Brad helped the company to expand its Indonesian operations, as well as its market share in the Small, Medium and Large Enterprise sectors, and the Carrier market.
Prior to joining Juniper Networks, Brad was Vice President, Asia South Pacific, at Unisphere Networks. He expanded the company’s presence in the region by establishing offices in Australia and India, and firmly established Unisphere Networks as a key partner within the region’s next-generation broadband service provider community.
A recent report by the US-based Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) validated what were probably not far from the minds of most CIO and IT executives around the globe; basically, there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to data center energy efficiencies. As a company committed to reducing its energy consumption whenever possible, Juniper Networks, the leader in high performance networking, has made increasing the efficiency of its operations a priority. Its data centers represent the biggest “consumers” of energy, so in 2007, one of IT’s objectives is to reduce its server footprint by 30 percent.
The objective of reducing the number of servers achieves two goals: reign in server sprawl and reduce energy consumption. As a company that has grown quickly in a short amount of time (to a USD 2 billion dollar company in just 10 years), servers were often deployed to fill a pressing need, resulting in approximately 1000 corporate servers geographically dispersed in many different sites and data centers. Not only were these servers becoming harder to keep track of and manage, but their proliferation was straining the basic resources of the data centers – they were running out of power and space.
The company took a hard look at their data center strategy and decided it was time to make some changes to improve their efficiency. To do this, IT looked at virtualization, which enables a single physical server to house multiple, independent operating systems and applications that are logically separated. Virtualization enables better data consumption and overall server utilization, ultimately enabling server consolidation that results in power, cooling, space and operational management efficiencies.
The first step involved taking an inventory of all their servers and really understanding what their relative importance was to the business. This was crucial as the IT department faced the dilemma of how to reduce the number of servers in the organization, while simultaneously continuing to support the still rapidly growing company’s evolving needs. Working with department heads, developers and application owners, IT was able to relatively quickly identify servers that could potentially be removed from the network or consolidated. As a result, they were able to retire dozens of servers and virtualize over a hundred servers, representing a reduction of over 50,000 Watts consumed per Hour.
Juniper is currently in the next phase of their server virtualization project, hoping to improve their reduction ratio by virtualizing 250 servers down to around 10. To do this, the company has partnered with one of its value added resellers, which is close to completing an audit that will be used to plan how to complete the large scale consolidation that remains.
Juniper has invested the time, capital and resources necessary to complete this target reduction. Juniper’s goal is to reduce its servers by 30%, which represents approximately 325 servers. This would represent a reduction of
1. 146250 Watts consumed per hour, 3,510,000 Watts per day, 1,277,640,000 Watts per year – the equivalent to what 1252 US residents would consume in a month
2. 32 racks
3. Thermal units (cooling)
Juniper expects to see a return on the investment (for the virtualization software licenses) within 12-14 months.
Next for 2008? When servers are added to the network, Juniper will invest in those that deliver energy efficiency and maximize their utilization. Juniper will continue to look at ways to improve efficiency because they realize that an innovative data center strategy makes sense for both the environment and its business.
The objective of reducing the number of servers achieves two goals: reign in server sprawl and reduce energy consumption. As a company that has grown quickly in a short amount of time (to a USD 2 billion dollar company in just 10 years), servers were often deployed to fill a pressing need, resulting in approximately 1000 corporate servers geographically dispersed in many different sites and data centers. Not only were these servers becoming harder to keep track of and manage, but their proliferation was straining the basic resources of the data centers – they were running out of power and space.
The company took a hard look at their data center strategy and decided it was time to make some changes to improve their efficiency. To do this, IT looked at virtualization, which enables a single physical server to house multiple, independent operating systems and applications that are logically separated. Virtualization enables better data consumption and overall server utilization, ultimately enabling server consolidation that results in power, cooling, space and operational management efficiencies.
The first step involved taking an inventory of all their servers and really understanding what their relative importance was to the business. This was crucial as the IT department faced the dilemma of how to reduce the number of servers in the organization, while simultaneously continuing to support the still rapidly growing company’s evolving needs. Working with department heads, developers and application owners, IT was able to relatively quickly identify servers that could potentially be removed from the network or consolidated. As a result, they were able to retire dozens of servers and virtualize over a hundred servers, representing a reduction of over 50,000 Watts consumed per Hour.
Juniper is currently in the next phase of their server virtualization project, hoping to improve their reduction ratio by virtualizing 250 servers down to around 10. To do this, the company has partnered with one of its value added resellers, which is close to completing an audit that will be used to plan how to complete the large scale consolidation that remains.
Juniper has invested the time, capital and resources necessary to complete this target reduction. Juniper’s goal is to reduce its servers by 30%, which represents approximately 325 servers. This would represent a reduction of
1. 146250 Watts consumed per hour, 3,510,000 Watts per day, 1,277,640,000 Watts per year – the equivalent to what 1252 US residents would consume in a month
2. 32 racks
3. Thermal units (cooling)
Juniper expects to see a return on the investment (for the virtualization software licenses) within 12-14 months.
Next for 2008? When servers are added to the network, Juniper will invest in those that deliver energy efficiency and maximize their utilization. Juniper will continue to look at ways to improve efficiency because they realize that an innovative data center strategy makes sense for both the environment and its business.
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