Did you know that buildings are responsible for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions? Given the increasing number of new buildings being built worldwide, there is a need to make buildings more intelligent and energy-efficient.
This is why Johnson Controls is delivering OpenBlue, a suite of connected building solutions that leverage artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things to redefine the blueprint for building design across industries. “Modern buildings are more than a collection of materials and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems. They’re smart environments that evolve each day. The faster we get new services out to our customers, the more intelligent and efficient their built environments become,” explains Suresh Mothikuru, Johnson Control’s vice president of Technology, Platform Engineering, and Reliability Engineering.
OpenBlue powers more than 20 of Johnson Controls’ advanced building services — from data-driven fire protection and HVAC systems to cybersecurity defences. It provides customers with features such as touchless data access, adaptable building environments, and sophisticated ventilation and sanitation systems.
To deliver the full value of OpenBlue to customers, Johnson Controls decided to be cloud-agnostic, multi-cloud and ensure that “everything runs on containers”, shares Mothikuru at the Pure//Accelerate 2023 event in Las Vegas yesterday. It, therefore, adopted Pure Storage’s Portworx as the underlying Kubernetes storage platform for its app development in the cloud and data recovery.
With Portworx, Johnson Controls gained a centralised capability to manage the data storage, backup, and disaster recovery operations within its cloud software team. It could also embrace the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) model to accelerate cloud deployments since Portworx allows all stateful workloads to be moved to Kubernetes-based deployments.
Besides that, Johnson Controls can also recover data quickly. This is because it uses Portworx for data backups across its app portfolio — including customer data and its core data workloads — and allows it to synchronously replicate data across nodes in its Kubernetes clusters.
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Portworx also allows Johnson Controls to accommodate different recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) to meet each customer’s needs.
“Portworx allows us to back up our application data and retrieve it at a moment’s notice, which gives both our business and our customers a peace of mind,” says Mothikuru.
He continues: “Our customers want to know their data is being backed up and that they are set up to recover from cybersecurity threats quickly,” says Mothikuru. “With Portworx, we can tick these all-important boxes while continuing to innovate and expand our data-driven services at pace.”
