Green data centre

The pace of business is rapidly accelerating. Globalisation and knowledge-based economies are forcing companies to embrace new business models and emerging technologies to stay competitive in a dynamic market. And the day-today pressures to cost effectively run the business – while supporting growth and innovation – are very real. This new market demands that IT improve service delivery, reduce costs, manage escalating complexity and better secure the enterprise. That's why aligning IT with the goals of the business is a top priority.

The new enterprise data centre is based on an evolutionary model for efficient IT delivery, one that helps provide the freedom to drive business innovation. It provides a highly dynamic, efficient and shared environment that allows IT to better manage costs, improve operational performance and resiliency and respond to business needs more quickly.

By adopting this environment, organisations can be better positioned to adopt and integrate new technologies, like Web 2.0 and cloud computing, to deliver dynamic and seamless access to IT services and resources. As a result, their IT departments can spend less time fixing IT problems and more time solving real business challenges. They gain this advantage by:

• Realising new economics through the implementation of energy efficient systems and services, as well as virtualisation and optimised networks across all resources.
• Achieving rapid levels of service delivery through the use of automation to drive efficiency and operational agility while reducing management burden and enabling efficient provisioning, security and resiliency.
• Aligning IT infrastructure with business goals to allow for rapid responses to changing needs, with new opportunities for making business decisions based on real-time information and tools for freeing up IT resources to focus on strategic, rather than operational, priorities.

A green data centre can offer further business advantages and cost savings. When it comes to power consumption, not all network gear is created equal. At Juniper Networks, achieving energy efficiency is a fundamental part of product design – not an afterthought

What makes IBM's approach for efficient IT service delivery so unique? First, we capture an end-to-end view of an organisation's IT data centre and its key components. From that we develop a customised strategy for a new enterprise data centre that integrates these elements:

• Highly virtualised resources. Remove the bind between applications, data and the underlying physical resources to better adjust to changing business needs and deliver responsive provisioning and efficient resource utilisation.
• Efficient, green and optimised infrastructures and facilities. Balance workloads across a virtualised infrastructure and align power consumption with business processing requirements.
• Business-driven service management. Reduce complexities by raising management tasks from the manual monitoring of individual resources to the automated orchestration of the entire environment.
• Business resiliency and security. Better secure the enterprise, to address issues introduced by consolidation of data centres and recentralisation of systems and data.
• Information infrastructure. Manage information growth with an end-to-end approach that increases service levels, meets compliance requirements and reduces total costs.

By making use of this holistic, integrated approach, some of our clients – and IBM's own data centre transformation – have shown the ability to:

• Triple asset utilisation¹
• Provision new resources in minutes²
• Reduce heat by up to 60%³
• Reduce floor space by as much as 80%⁴
• Reduce energy consumption by up to 40%⁵

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To truly maximise the benefits of this new approach, an organisation must plan how it will adopt it. IBM has identified three typical stages of adoption:

Simplified: This stage is about driving new levels of economics in the data centre by addressing operational issues through consolidation, virtualisation, energy offerings and service management. Most enterprises start with this stage.

Shared: By shifting the focus from operational management to service management, this stage creates a shared IT infrastructure that can be provisioned and scale rapidly and efficiently. Organisations can create virtualised resource pools for server platforms, storage systems, networks, and applications, delivering IT to end users in a more fluid way.

Dynamic: At this stage, organisations achieve alignment with business goals and can respond dynamically as business needs arise. Far from the "break/fix" mentality gripping many data centres, this new environment creates an infrastructure that is economical, integrated, agile and responsive. These qualities emerge as a result of the organisation having harvested new technologies to support the new type of business enterprise – including social networking, highly integrated web 2.0 applications and cloud computing – and deliver rich, real-time information as needed.

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IBM offers an approach built on client experience and our own data centre transformation, which embraces open standards and is supported by an ecosystem of technology partners like Juniper Networks. IBM continues to invest in open communities to speed the process and acceptance of new technologies. Our commitment is based on our own experience and a proven track record of harnessing new, disruptive innovations. From technology, to consulting and strategy services, to the implementation of business processes – the new enterprise data centre can help enable innovation in your organisation.

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Juniper Networks is helping customers everywhere to take a hard look at their networking infrastructure and find ways to lower their power consumption and carbon footprint. Frequently, this involves challenging the status quo as far as evaluating and acquiring network equipment is concerned. Through our partnership with Juniper, IBM is helping businesses become greener through several solution-related strategies:

More energy-efficient network equipment

When it comes to power consumption, not all network gear is created equal. For example, the EX 3200 switch power is only 190W as opposed to a comparable switch from one of our competitors at more than 250W. This amounts to a reduction of 0.4 tons of CO2 emissions per year.

While that difference may seem small, in a typical corporate network setup, the savings can really add up. Take a network that consists of 2,500 converged access ports, 80 fiber Gigabit Ethernet aggregation ports and 20 10-Gbps backbone ports. Theoretically, a savings of more than 50% in power and 80% in space could be achieved using Juniper Networks' solutions.

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When one piece of equipment performs the function of several devices, the benefits are threefold: greater power savings, less space used, and easier management. When considering an integrated approach like this, clients often worry that the tradeoff will be compromised performance. Juniper Networks' solutions are designed with high performance in mind – and it shows in real-world performance.

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Virtualisation can help reduce an organisation's hardware footprint by running multiple instances of an application on a single piece of hardware, such as a server. Virtualisation reduces power consumption while simplifying management. Juniper Networks offers several virtualisation technologies for use in network infrastructure, which can be used alone or combined to achieve even greater power efficiency:

• Virtual Chassis™
• Virtual Systems
• MPLS

Virtual Chassis

Enterprises often "overprovision" network equipment when planning for growth. For example, huge chassis-based switches are often purchased with many slots left empty for future expansion. A switch that isn't fully utilised consumes large amounts of power – and requires lots of cooling.

Juniper Networks' EX4200 switches with Virtual Chassis technology can address this issue. They feature the same level of performance, redundancy, density and manageability but offer the flexibility of adding switches as the organisation grows, along with a smaller footprint as compared to traditional chassis-based switches.

Virtual Systems

Juniper Networks' NS5000/ISG range of firewalls allows for configuration of virtual routers, virtual firewalls, and complete virtual systems. Compliance requirements often demand that an enterprise segments its network into different departments, such as HR, Finance, or Engineering. With Virtual Systems, a single device can provide "virtual firewalls" for each of those segments instead of having multiple firewalls. Virtualisation can be applied to Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) as well.

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)

Offered by service providers, MPLS has traditionally been aimed at enterprises that require a WAN connection but still need to retain the logical separation of their L2 & L3 services. However, more and more enterprises are now deploying this technology within their WAN core network as well.

Juniper Networks is no stranger to MPLS, having deployed this technology in the routers which are being used by service providers today. With MPLS, enterprises can dispense with the multiple firewalls to enforce policies and "separate" their applications.

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Through the use of application acceleration technology like Juniper Networks' WX solution, organisations can reap the benefits offered by WAN consolidation. But because [of whatever that other sentence is trying to say] many enterprises end up paying for higher bandwidth than they need, or maintaining multiple WAN links. The result is the accumulation of more and more network equipment.

Application acceleration can help realise tremendous reduction in traffic traversing the WAN link for the same set of applications, reducing the need for multiple WANs, lots of redundant equipment or increasing bandwidth. With application acceleration, enterprises can potentially consolidate their multiple WAN links into a single WAN link.

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Juniper Networks is committed to protecting the environment, conserving energy and natural resources, and reducing pollution through the application of responsible business practices and energy efficient technologies across the company's daily operations and product designs.

Juniper strives to set new energy efficiency standards in the networking industry, with environmental and energy conservation initiatives that strive to:

• Minimise the overall impact the company has on the environment
• Deliver high-performance network infrastructure that complies with environmental regulations and directives
• Further the energy efficiency goals of Juniper customers

Read more about Juniper Networks' Commitment to Environmental Issues(254 KB)

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• The Essential Guide to Deploying MPLS for Enterprise Networks (644 KB)
• Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) (272 KB)
• Best Practices for Video Transit on an MPLS Backbone (731 KB)
• Enhancing and Simplifying Video Distribution using MPLS (2 MB)
• Virtualisation Technologies Overview (554 KB)
• Juniper Networks EX 4200 Series Switches Deliver True Chassis Functionality in a Stackable Form Factor (796 KB)
• Virtual Systems (96 KB)

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• Applications and network performance optimisation
• Security solutions
• Routing and Switching

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