Below is a video highlighting the first part of the day: initiating the live demo. Areg Alimian, Technical Product Manager, introduces the equipment being used. Juniper Networks T1600 is connected to Ixia's XM12 chassis. The demo will drive full 640Gb of IP UDP traffic through the router. The demo is conducted in Ixia's 'iSimCity' - a virtualization environment that simulates the traffic a small city would create. So, while we all spent our time chatting and eating delicious catered food, the T1600 was stoically sitting on it's rack pushing a city's worth of video, email, web pages, etc through it's ports.
Next, we reconvened in the main presentation room to participate in a panel discussion. There were four members on the panel: Vic Alston, Sr Vice President of Product Development at Ixia; Juniper's Luc Ceuppens, as mentioned before; Andrew Fanara, Team Leader of Product Development with the EPA; and Bruce Nordman of the Energy Analysis Department with Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. The video below only shows highlights of the panel discussion. Both Andrew and Bruce are not shown in it, but that is not to discredit their insights. (More on their involvements after the video.)
Bruce Nordman, a fellow Cal grad, revealed statistical data concerning the amount of energy being consumed. He informed us how each KWh for IT means another KWh for power and cooling. "The server data center is 10% of the IT load and gets more attention than other networking equipment." He stressed how ECR has been a long time coming. Bruce works closely with Andrew Fanara of EPA, and related the test procedure and metrics of ECR to that of Energy star which is where Andrew's expertise lies.
Andrew said that good cost-effective strategies of the data center came into his radar when a report was sent to Congress. He mentioned how every sector has to be looked at, whether it be warehouses, hospitals or schools, and notes how "benchmarking allows for improvements"
The final video shows the results of the demo. Since this is the first time a piece of equipment has been put through this Class One test, the results are not what you would typically anticipate. No one won a gold medal or received a seal of approval. Ixia provides an un-biased comparison of what level of energy networking products are consuming. The results show that there is a reliable, repeatable and accurate testing methodology for power utilization based on real world loads. The T1600 is the first product to go through this testing.
I am curious to see what happens after more tests have been performed. The more products that are tested, the more we will be able to try to beat our own performances as well as the performances of other companies. From my own "un-biased" opinion, if I can even have one from the place I am sitting, it’s not [only] about competing product against product, company against company. ECR allows us to do a bit of self-assessment on the grounds that change needs to be made. I hope that everyone hops on board and continues to work in the direction of lowering the amount of energy we are consuming.
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