Yahoo Japan is set to roll out 50,000 virtual machines (VMs) next year as part of its data centre transformation program.
The company’s IT infrastructure is a compound of data centres that covers the Tokyo metropolitan area and east Japan. According to Yahoo Japan, 88 per cent of Internet users in the country access its website regularly which places heavy demand on its data centre infrastructure.
Speaking at OpenStack Summit 2013 in Hong Kong, Yahoo Japan technical director Norifumi Matsuya told delegates that prior to virtualization, it was wasting rack space by only housing a few servers in each rack.
In April 2013, the company implemented OpenStack Neutron load balancer as a service (LBaaS) to allow future scaling requirements. It also selected Brocade ADX switches to help with fast application delivery.
“Eighty per cent of our VMs will be managed by OpenStack,” said Matsuya.
“We believe that data centre life cycle management is essential. I estimate that we could reduce more than 60 per cent of hardware costs today if we can migrate [data centre] tenants to new hardware.”
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Brocade cloud orchestration product manager Didier Stolphe said Yahoo Japan selected ADX as it wanted a solution that supported direct server return (DSR).
“DSR allows the server to send a response back to the client directly without forcing the traffic to travel via the network load balancer.”
Since the implementation, Yahoo Japan has reduced its data centre energy and hardware costs.
Hamish Barwick travelled to OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong as a guest of OpenStack
Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick
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