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Energy Savings: Data Center to Desktop

I was the moderator and presenter with Jim Davies, CTO of Mitel on March 11, 2008 of an on-demand webinar and podcast: "Discover the Green of Technology". We both covered a number of useful tips on energy savings from the data center to the desktop. I cannot go through all of the many recommendations, so I have taken a few of the nuggets from the presentation to highlight in this blog.

I was the moderator and presenter with Jim Davies, CTO of Mitel on March 11, 2008 of an on-demand webinar and podcast: "Discover the Green of Technology". We both covered a number of useful tips on energy savings from the data center to the desktop. I cannot go through all of the many recommendations, so I have taken a few of the nuggets from the presentation to highlight in this blog.The Mitel approach is to consider the entire network and applications structure. Power savings can occur at any point in the data center, network and desktop. The important point is that an enterprise should look from the top to the bottom of the network as well as the more traditional power saving solution such as efficient lighting, heating and cooling of the office environments.

An interesting Mitel capability is to control the use of the heating, cooling and lights through the phone usage. When the phones are in use, the local office area has the utilities environment turned on and automatically turned off when the user becomes inactive after a time out period. The phone usage pattern help reduce the environmental power usage.

Mitel provided a comparison of their IP phone, model 5312, compared to midrange sets (Cisco 7910 and Avaya 4602sw). These are typically the IP phones that constitute the majority of sets in an average installation. Mitel claimed its IP phone saved $8,400 and 86 tons of CO2 over the lifetime of 600 IP phones. Phone power usage numbers are for typical usage when the phone is idle. The quoted electricity rate of 7.776 cents/kWh comes from the Energy Information Administration's "Monthly Energy Review". The CO2 emissions for electricity come from the EPA and are based on a national average. The savings mentioned are conservative. The latest EPA figures are indicating that the average power rate is much higher, 9.4 cents/kWh, producing an even greater savings than indicated. The case for European power savings is even grater that in North America, because the European power rates are much higher.

The power conservation mode used in LAN switches uses the IEEE Link Layer Discovery protocol (LLDP) standard, which is similar to Cisco's CDP. These protocols operate from the LAN switch to the IP phone to determine the power class and deliver the appropriate power level in 0.1 watt increments. The IP phone conservation mode turns off the display when there is no phone activity, thereby further reducing the energy consumption. The LLDP or CDP features are available on several vendors' LAN switches.

The LLDP and CDP protocols communicating from the LAN switch to the IP phone can be used to negotiate many features like security and power consumption. This protocol may already be in the enterprise's LAN switches and not turned on, or the LAN switch can be upgraded with a software download. LLDP/CDP allows better tuning of the power supplies and reduces the power conversion unit requirements.

The average PC consumes about 80 watts. Sun has been a proponent of the thin client technology, SunRay. With power conservation emerging as a major issue, IT departments should consider thin clients just for the power reduction benefits. The thin client connected to a server over Ethernet can deliver all the functionality available in a desktop PC, while consuming only 4 watts.

Server virtualization can increase the utilization of the servers. Virtualization can also slow the server growth, thereby reducing the energy consumption growth. Virtualization can reduce server equipment costs and reduce the energy bill to power and cool the servers. A common sense, but ignored server issue, is server retirement without removing or turning off the retired server. According to Kenneth Brill of the Uptime Institute, "the annual facility cost of a server is $1,600 per year. Of this, $700 is for electricity." The average cost of a server is about $3,000. So do the math, in four years the energy costs will equal the purchase cost of the server.

Many Green proponents are talking globally. The recommendations provide significant power savings locally and the savings can be realized rapidly and permanently.