INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology
FACILITY TEAMS ARE NOT
GENERALLY INTERESTED
IN THE CARBON
FOOTPRINT CREATED
BY EACH VEHICLE THEY
PURCHASE. INSTEAD,
THE ENTERPRISE IS
FOCUSED ON WHAT IT
CAN CONTROL, ITS OWN
CARBON FOOTPRINT
bleached boxes - helped Brand-Rex lower
its products carbon footprint by over 1000
tonnes in a year.
Such investments and savings might not
be applicable for every customer. What
they do enable customers to know is
that that they are buying from a carbon
sensitive company. Such a move plays
well in the corporate environmental
impact space.
So how does this translate into the
enterprise or data centre network?
Inside the data centre and
comms room
Can savings be made in the network?
The answer is yes, plenty! They start with
simple things such as virtualisation, better
cable management and choice of cabling.
Before any choice of cable is made, good
management and practice is essential. Key
gains such as better aisle containment,
making sure blanking plates are fitted,
that there are no air leaks around racks
and that hot and cold air are not mixing
are basic requirements. Don’t be surprised
if, when you wander around your own
data centre, you see some of these not
being done properly. It requires effective
management and process to make sure
checks take place regularly.
(For the full article, please visit
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60
INTELLIGENTCIO
At a glance…
Juniper opens data
centre network
operating system Junos
After launching a line of data centre network switches that can
run other companies’ operating systems, Juniper Networks has
opened its data centre network operating system Junos so other
companies’ software can run on top of it. Initially, this capability
is only available on a new line of Juniper hardware switches that
run the open version of Junos.
Both the open version of Junos and Juniper’s new QFX5200 access
switches, which support 25/50 Gigabit Ethernet, can be bought
together or separately, the company announced Tuesday. When
bought together, however, they enable deployment of third-party
network services or applications directly on the Juniper platform.
They also enable users to write their own software directly to
the platform using the software model defined by the Open
Compute Project, the Facebook-led open source data centre and
hardware design initiative.
Major networking technology vendors opening up their stacks
for greater interoperability is a recent trend. The traditional
model for top vendors like Juniper, Cisco, HP, and Dell has been
to sell tightly integrated data centre networking solutions that
included hardware and software and were completely closed
and proprietary. In other words, you get the functionality and
interoperability the vendor provides; nothing less, nothing more.
But web-scale data centre operators like Google and Facebook
found that off-the-shelf networking gear didn’t exactly provide
what they needed. It was expensive, impossible to customise,
and had functionality they did not need. Google was a pioneer
among data centre operators that started designing their
own switch hardware and sourcing it directly from design
manufacturers in Asia – often the same ones that built off-theshelf systems for the incumbent vendors.
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