BANGALORE, INDIA: The need for optimal utilization of power and reduction of carbon footprint is driving enterprises to adopt green storage and server solutions. However, they often tend to  neglecting the network part. As the data centers keep adding racks to accommodate more data, the load on the network increases leading to higher power consumption.

Adopting a 'green' network at a data center can actually help  reduce power consumption by servers, says Oliver Tavakoli, vice president, Architecture and Technology, SLT, Juniper Networks in an interview with CIOL. Excerpts:

CIOL: How important is the role played by a network in reducing the carbon footprint at  data centers ?

Oliver Tavakoli: A data center has a whole convergence of equipment. Most of the energy in the data centers goes to servers. Network equipment uses only about 15 per cent of the energy in a data center. So it is not the biggest bucket. But here is the important point; if you design the right kind of network at a data center, you can save a lot of energy in a server and storage equipment.

In modern data centers there are racks and rows of storage equipment. Because of the way the networks are designed, the equipment don't really have the freedom to move workload from one rack to another or shutdown one rack and save energy. If you design the right kind of network for the data center it will help you to save 20 per cent energy among the 85 per cent prower consuming equipment.

CIOL: What are the major challenges in establishing a green network ?

OT: The world today is inter-dependent and based on networks. The world can even stop without a network. A network has a positive role to play in de-materialization, as it allows other parts of economy to use less material and less carbon. Networks allow transfer of most things today which is helping to lessen the carbon footprint.

But the network has to continue to scale, it has to continue to run at high performance and it has to be reliable and secure. So the biggest issue in green IT in the network is not just how green the network itself is but how green a network can make the rest of the world.

CIOL: Today, green IT is the buzzword with almost all IT vendors. What has been Juniper's approach in this regard ?

OT: Juniper believes in corporate citizenship and sustainability. We want to measure the energy efficiency of our products in  a systematic way across the board for all of our products, and commit to doing that. We want to make sure that all our best practices in building our boxes, which we do very well at the high end, are also taken to mid and low range, so that we can focus on energy consumptions across the board.

So we need to have clear standards, just like in case of refrigerators, on how you measure the energy efficiency and make that available in such a way that any third party can verify it. It is not the question of who is saying what about the products, but there should be a clear definition of what the engineering does. This is one big initiative we are drawing. The power consumption may vary at different levels of workload or when in idle mode. So any standard measurement should incorporate details at different levels of operation also.

CIOL: Juniper has been investing a lot in R&D. What can your customers look forward in the coming times?

OT: Investment in data centers has been an area of big concern for our customers. Enterprises today are working to bring all the data into one place. This kind of  consolidation  will mean new challenges on how the  network scales and how resilient will it be.

On the service providers' end, there is a lot of investment around the next generation of routers and switches. The 1 GB interfaces have now become normal and people have started talking about 40 GB or 100 GB interfaces. So the speeds are going up, the amount of network usage is going up and the amount of videos on the network is going up.

So we continually have to provide equipment to enable service providers to provide better services for their employees and customers.

We have been successful in reducing the heat to make networks operate efficiently. The additional investments that we are making is to translate the best-in-class engineering to our mid and low ranges. We are also investing a lot of our R&D effort in energy around the idle load and variable load. At an enterprise level, there can be a lot of devices that lie idle many times. The new technology can help them save a lot of power.