Green IT or environmental sustainability of enterprise operations and associated life cycles of products, services, resources and supply chain came into focus during 2007. The drivers pushing the IT industry over the tipping point into a Green posture are many. They include climate change concerns, oil dependency, high-energy cost, pollution and an increasing moral and social responsibility to gift the next generation an environmentally friendly economy. In addition to these concerns is the fact that Green is now economically compelling, equipping business and IT leaders with technologies that are not only energy efficient but deliver material ROI. And if there is one thing that CIOs are experts at it is calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI. While Green IT addresses many areas, the single largest IT investment that can benefit from Green IT and reduce its IT carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is the data center and networks.

The Size of the Problem

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has calculated energy consumption and trends of US data centers. The energy used by the nation’s servers and data centers is significant. It is estimated that this sector consumed approximately 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, which accounted for 1.5 % of total U.S. electricity consumption for an electricity cost of about $4.5 billion. This level of electricity consumption is greater than that consumed by the nation’s color televisions and similar to the amount of electricity consumed by approximately 5.8 million average U.S. households, or nearly 5 % of total U.S. housing. Federal servers and data centers alone account for approximately 6 billion kWh (10 percent) of this electricity use, for a total electricity cost of about $450 million annually.

The energy use of the nation’s servers and data centers in 2006 is estimated to be more than double the electricity that was consumed in 2000. One type of server, the volume server, was responsible for the majority (68 percent) of the electricity consumed by IT equipment in data centers in 2006. The energy used by this type of server more than doubled from 2000 to 2006, which was the largest increase among different types of servers thanks to low cost and, unfortunately, power supply efficiency in the 50% range. The power and cooling infrastructure that supports IT equipment in data centers uses significant energy, accounting for 50 percent of the total consumption of data centers. Among the different types of data centers, more than one-third (38 percent) of electricity use is attributable to the nation’s largest (i.e., enterprise-class) and most rapidly growing data centers. Data center energy consumption is projected to double again by 2011 unless efficiencies are implemented.

There are many opportunities and options available to increase energy efficiency, cut CO2 emissions, save money and avoid cost all simultaneously. To limit climate changes, many believe that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 25 gigatonnes (Gt) to 30 Gt of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) annually by 2030. Note a tonne is a metric ton. This is measured against “business as usual” projections. IT’s impact will be helping enterprises achieve that measure. Gartner estimates IT’s total CO2 emissions is approximately 0.6 Gt. Clearly, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a world wide economy initiative with IT’s contribution being on the order of .02%. But every industry sector needs to contribute. And contribute they will.

Green Industry Initiatives

Various groups within the IT community have organized a range of uncoordinated initiatives such as the Green Grid which promises to enhance data center efficiency by developing industry-standard metrics and new standards that the industry can adopt. The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is trying to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving the efficiency of power supplies and motherboards. The Green Technology Initiative was established to help UK businesses reduce the carbon footprint of their IT systems in line with the UK government target of a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. While these are commendable organizations and efforts, what is lacking is business and IT leader inclusion as well as a single organizing principal which sets an overall industry agenda for Green IT. The IETF and IEEE should step up and take on this role.

Government Regulations and Mandates

There has been legislation around the globe during the past few years to provide mandates and regulations. In Europe and Japan, numerous regulations that address reduction, reuse, and recycling in IT-related operations have been developed. Europe is certainly ahead of the US with the EU’s WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment). Its Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is one of the most mature programs with implications for IT manufacturers; the Eco-design of Energy-using Products or EuP and REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical Substances) round out EU regulations. Japan’s Ministry of Tourism, Trade, and Industry (MTTI) is similar to RoHS. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program has delivered its Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency Public Law 109-431 which researched data center energy consumption, industry measures for server efficiency, and energy-saving technologies. The Regional Green House Gas Initiative (RGGI), led by nine U.S. states, is a state government-level program seeking to provide flexibility in the way that emissions from commercial operations are managed. The bottom line is that as Green IT progresses through 2008 and 2009 so too will the amounts of legislation, regulations and government mandates.

Corporate Self Imposed Green Initiatives and Mandates

Green IT, which has been a long-standing initiative in Europe and Japan, has finally become an issue in the U.S. The EPA report mentioned above is driving change. Almost every major organization has a corporate social responsibility officer to assure that environmentally friendly processes are in place. IT generally falls outside the realm of the corporate social responsibility officer, but IT will start to be measured by this office in 2008. When that happens Green IT will be a corporate mandate in addition to government-mandated regulations around power and cooling. This will change the way IT buys and builds data centers. One of the big evaluation criteria, by the end of next year, may be power and cooling efficiencies of IT equipment, which may change data center supplier market share. As power and cooling efficiency becomes data center table stakes, virtualization will go beyond power, space and cooling savings and efficiencies, moving into networks where many-to-one management and one-to-many service distribution efficiencies are gained.

Green Data Center Networking

Networking, especially in the data center, is going Green. First, networking has become the business platform by supporting more and more services such as unified communications, security, telepresense, non-stop operations, etc. All IT devices are plugged into the network and now the network is also a distribution of power, with power over Ethernet (PoE) providing power to WLAN access points, IP telephones, point of sale equipment, printers, physical security devices, health care instrumentation, etc. Network switches will become the central distribution point for smart and efficient distribution of electricity to tens of thousands of low power consuming end-points. In fact many firms such as Cisco, Foundry, Extreme and ProCurve are developing smart schemes to distribute PoE.

Efficient PoE Distribution

Cisco in particular has launched its enhanced PoE software, which is scheduled to be available across the entire Catalyst switching portfolio. End- point power requirements vary depending upon the end-point function. Color display IP phones consume more power than black and white. Wireless access points vary in their power consumption too as do non-networking devices such as medical equipment, physical security devices, cameras and point of sale devices. Most Ethernet switches deliver constant power to each port independent of its requirements. Cisco’s enhanced PoE solution supports an auto-negotiated power requirement feature, thanks to its Cisco Discovery Protocol, which delivers power required by the end-point up to 18.5 Watts per port. This Green technology saves power consumption by treading PoE as a pool of power to be distributed efficiently to end-points based upon need.

The data center network has not traditionally been a major contributor to data center power problems mainly because of the relatively low consumption of power by the network compared to compute and storage devices. Most estimates of IT infrastructure consumption range from 8 to 12 percent for the network. But as mentioned above, with more services going into the network and the network now being a distributor of power to end-points the network’s consumption and distribution of power will only increase.

High Port Density=Fewer Switches=Less Power Consumed

As data center virtualization increases the number of network ports decrease, but their bandwidth per port increases significantly. Higher bandwidth ports draw more power. Data center switches are becoming denser in order to support larger numbers of high speed 1 and 10 Gbs Ethernet while getting ready for 40 and 100 Gbs Ethernet. Best practice data center network design calls for high port density switches such as Cisco’s new Nexus switches and Foundry Networks BigIron RX. The Nexus supports 512 10 Gbs Ethernet ports per system while the Foundry BigIron RX supports 128-10 Gbs ports. These highly dense switches reduce the number of switches needed in a data center to connect servers. The fewer switches drawing power the less power consumed. Not only are the number of switches reduced but their interconnection is reduced as well, which drives up the port count and power draw. For example, the Foundry BigIron RX populated with 128-10Gbs ports draws approximately 10 kW while a multi-tiered network of switches providing the same connectivity may consume 40-50 kW.

With green engineering of switches including power supply efficiency of 80 to 90% plus state-of-the-art ASIC and low power fans cooling switches down, a power efficiency of networking between 75% to 80% can be achieved! In addition consider the server efficiency gained thanks to 10Gbs Ethernet. 10 Gbs Ethernet increases the number of servers per I/O module. For example, a VMWare server with 8-1 Gbs Ethernet ports versus 2-10 Gbs Ethernet ports delivers 16 servers per I/O module with 10Gbs versus 6 servers per I/O module at 1 Gbs, a nearly 3 x increase in I/O efficiency.

Unified Data Center Network

Another huge change in data center design is the advent of a unified networking fabric and I/O which enables storage and HPC (High Performance Computing) traffic to converge upon a single Ethernet/IP network lowering overall data center power draw by the consolidation of numerous devices. Cisco’s new Nexus data center switches boast that they will reduce overall data center power consumption by up to 8% by enabling a unified fabric and I/O. If all data centers across the US utilized the Cisco Nexus 7000, then a reduction of 4.8 b kWh of electricity would be consumed, $360M of energy cost would be saved and 48 Mega Tonnes (Mt) of CO2 emissions would not be distributed into the atmosphere.

Data centers are built with front-end networks, back-end networks, storage networks and a backup network made up of the interconnection of infiniband, fiber channel and Ethernet switching devices. The new Cisco Nexus will consolidate these special interconnects into 10 G Ethernet, with 40 and 100 Gbs Ethernet scheduled to ship as the standards emerge. Not only is power consumption reduced but operational efficiencies are gained too. Once servers are connected to this unified fabric they can connect to any network such as SAN, LAN, HPC, etc. Every server or host will be able to mount any storage target, which will drive storage consolidation and improve overall storage utilization. We’ll dive into the Cisco Nexus in Lippis Report 99.

The tools and techniques to Green the Enterprise and Data Center Network are now available. Business and IT leaders can reduce cost, increase power efficiency, reduce their CO2 footprint, all while improving network and application performance and feeling good about themselves and their company. To gain these benefits business and IT leaders should favor networking companies that have a strong commitment to green networking and can provide both products and best practices to assist in achieving their green initiatives.

Posted 28 January 2008 at 12:59 pm under Lippis Report, Unified Communications & Comm.-Enabled Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.