Broadband World Forum Europe 2009: Evolving the data center model

[#1]

By David Noguer Bau, Head of Carrier Ethernet, Juniper Networks

Wednesday 9^th September 2009

What a way to end Broadband World Forum Europe 2009!  Today, Juniper Networks hosted a panel discussion looking at evolving the data center model and was also present on a further three panels.  As the chairman of Juniper's panel discussion, data centers are a topic close to my heart.  Indeed, with the growth of content-rich services such as IPTV and Web2.0 over the past four years, most of the data on the network is hosted in data centers, which makes the topic particularly interesting for today's telecoms sector.  It certainly sparked some interesting ideas from the panelists!

Lior Cohen from Juniper Networks highlighted the importance of a flexible infrastructure to accommodate the demand that comes from the application.  Miguel Costa from Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) urged service providers to consider a carrier ethernet solution because it provides access to data centers but also the connectivity between data centers. 

Unsurprisingly, sustainability was another aspect of the data center that was put forward by our panelists. I was impressed with Sibylle David's internal business case at Orange for moving beyond looking for efficiency in servers to extending the efficiency drive to other network elements such as security and routers.  With only 300K € invested in one part of his server virtualization project (Ecocenter), Orange saw ROI in less than a year based on power efficiency.  At Telstra, Michael Lawrey talked about how the company is looking at the physical building design in the company's green IT drive.  The key element is moving every single application from AC to DC power to reduce heat generation. 

Telstra also touched on how it is making an effort to accommodate cloud computing as part of its business model and SaaS (software as a service) is the first step.  It will be offering cloud computing services to its customers through a SaaS platform.  Rashik Parmar at IBM, on the other hand, suggested that IBM's history is all about cloud.  The biggest move today is that cloud computing can be used by all - small businesses as well as the large enterprises.  In order to address market trends with regards to cloud computing, IBM is using Twitter and Facebook to develop new services.  Rashik sees that the cloud computing value chain needs service providers otherwise there is no bandwidth for such applications.

I must thank all the panelists that joined me today.  It was a very interesting debate that was warmly welcomed by the very full seminar room!  If there are a couple of points to take home, they are that there is definitely a need for high-performance networks to connect data centers to the end user, and that there is a need for service providers to be involved in the new business model. 

Message Edited by ChloeVaidya on 09-09-2009 12:46 PM

Message Edited by ac on 09-14-2009 11:27 AM