The Green Network

The Green Network to save the

earth

What Is Green?

What Is Networking?

A network is a series of points or nodes interconnected by communication paths.

Networking is the construction, design, and use of a network.

So, Green Networking Is . . .

Let’s Analyze A News . . . A new study reveals that the information,

communication and technology (ICT) industry contributes to about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, the same amount that the aviation industry produces.

Researchers from the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) and Bell Labs have estimated that the ICT industry, which comprises Internet and cloud services, discharges more than 830 million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Let’s Analyze A News . . . Carbon dioxide is one of the primary

greenhouse gases that is responsible for the increase in global temperatures. CO2 is naturally present in the Earth's atmosphere, but the emission levels of the gas have significantly increased due to human activities.

Researchers involved in the new study have projected that the emission of carbon by the ICT sector is likely to double by the year 2020.

2020 ICT Carbon Footprint

820m tons CO2

360m tons CO2

260m tons CO2

2007 Worldwide ICTcarbon footprint:2% = 830 m tons CO2

Comparable to theglobal aviation industry

Expected to grow to 4% by 2020 The Climate Group, GeSI

Report “Smart 2020”, 2008

Why Save Energy?

Consciousness of environmental problems tied to Greenhouse Gases (GHG) has increased in recent years.

All around the world, various studies started highlighting the devastating effects of massive GHG emissions and their consequences on climate change.

According to a report published by the European Union, a decrease in emission volume of 15%–30% is required before year 2020 to keep the global temperature increase below 2 ◦C.

Why Save Energy?

GHG effects are not limited to the environment, though.

Their influence on the economy have also been investigated and their financial damage has been put in perspective with the potential economical saving that would follow GHG reduction.

In particular, projected that a 1/3 reduction of the GHG emissions may generate an economical saving higher than the investment required to reach this goal.

Why Save Energy?

GHG reduction objectives involve many industry branches, including the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, especially considering the penetration of these technologies in everyday life.

Indeed , the volume of CO2 emissions

produced by the ICT sector alone has been estimated to be approximately 2 % of the total man-made emissions.

Why Save Energy?

Energy becomes more expensive.

People become more conscious of the negative effects of energy consumption on the environment.

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact.

Where To Save Energy?

Large-scale ICT infrastructures expanded rapidly and their energy consumption grew drastically these last few years.

As networks and data centers are generally prepared to face high load conditions, these infrastructures are under-utilized most of the time.

Network equipments, in particular, could be switched off when the load is low and switched on again when traffic increases, or when a failure happens, requiring redundant equipments to take the duty.

There is, there, a clear direction to save energy.

Where To Save Energy?

Data-centers and networking infrastructure involve high-performance and high-availability machines. They therefore rely on powerful devices, which require energy-consuming air conditioning to sustain their operation, and which are organized in a redundant architecture.

As these architectures are often designed to endure peak load and degraded conditions, they are underutilized in normal operation, leaving a large room for energy savings.

How Can We Solve?

Select energy-efficient technologies and products.

Minimize resource use whenever possible.

In recent years, valuable efforts have indeed been dedicated to reducing unnecessary energy expenditure which is called greening.

Definition of Green

Green is a simple approach of trying to live in harmony with nature, whether in small increments, or from the ground up, in terms of our living and working environment.

• G - Generate less waste• R - Recycle everything that cannot be

reused • E - Educate the community on eco-

friendly options• E - Evaluate the environmental impact of

actions• N- Nourish discussions and activities that

integrate environmental education into existing curriculum

So, Green Networking Means . . . Greening of the networking technologies and

protocols.

Optimize networking or make it more efficient, reduce energy consumption, conserve bandwidth.

Embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks.

Any process that will ultimately reduce energy use and, indirectly, cost.

Green Networking Practices Implementing virtualization. Practicing server consolidation. Upgrading older equipment for newer,

more energy-efficient products. Employing systems management to

increase efficiency. Substituting telecommuting, remote

administration and videoconferencing for travel.

Green Networking

Green networking is an initiative begun by many telecommunication companies to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions from base stations.

Base station emissions are expected to peak at 22 megatons this year and with green initiatives drop 30% to 15.6 megatons by 2014.

If these measures are not instituted carbon

emissions are expected to rise to 35 megatons in 5 years.

Green Networking

The objective of green networking is to aim at the minimization of the GHG emissions.

An obvious first step in this direction is to enforce as much as possible the use of renewable energy in ICT.

Yet another natural track is to design low power components, able to offer the same level of performance.

Green Networking

However, these are not the only leads: redesigning thenetwork architecture itself, for instance by de-locating network equipment towards strategic places, may yield substantial savings too for two main reasons.

The first reason is related to the losses that appear when energy is transported: the closer the consumption points are to the production points, the lower this loss will be.

The second reason is related to the cooling of electronic devices: air-cooling represents an important share of the energy expenditure in data centers and cold climates may lessen this dependency.

Companies Going Green

Google displaced their server farms to the banks of the Columbia River to take advantage of the energy offered by the hydroelectric power plants nearby.

The water flow provided by the river may in addition be used within the cooling systems, as experimented by Google, even though this may lead to other environmental issues such as seaweed proliferation if the water temperature increases too much.

Companies Going Green

An alternative cooling system, investigated by Microsoft in the In Tent and Marlow projects consists in leaving servers in the open air so that heating dissipates more easily.

Canada advanced research and innovation network (CANARIE) is strongly pushing in this direction, especially using virtualization to ease service geographical delocalization driven by the energy source availability.

Definition Of Green Networking

Green networking may be better seen as

“ a way to reduce energy required to carry out a given task while maintaining the same level of performance ”.

Green Networking

Green Networking covers all aspects of the network (personalcomputers, peripherals, switches, routers, and communication media).

Energy efficiencies of all network components must be optimized to have a significant impact on the overall energy consumption by these components.

Consequently, these efficiencies gained by having a Green Network will reduce CO2 emissions and thus will help mitigate global warming.

New ICT technologies must be explored and the benefits of these technologies must be assessed in terms of energy efficiencies and their associated benefits in minimizing the environmental impact of ICT.

Goals Of Green Networking

Reduction of energy consumption. Improvement of energy efficiency.

Consideration of the environmental impact of network components

from design to end of use.

Integration of network infrastructure and network services; this integration consolidates traditional different networks into one network.

Making the network more intelligent; the intelligent network will be more responsive, requiring less power to operate.

Compliance with regulatory reporting requirements.

Promotion of a cultural shift in thinking about how we can reduce carbon emissions.

Power Usage Of ICT Devices

Desktop computers and monitors consume 39% of all electrical power used in ICT. In 2002, this equated to 220 Mt (millions tons of CO2 emission).

The Green Strategies

Old Cathode Ray Tube monitors should be replaced with Liquid Crystal Display screens which reduce monitor energy consumption by as much as 80%.

Replacing all desktop PCs with laptops would achieve a 90% decrease in power consumption.

Energy can also be saved by using power saving software installed on desktops and running all the time. The power saving software controls force PCs to go into standby when not in use.

Another option is to use solid state hard drives that use 50% less power than mechanical hard drives.

The Green Strategies

Modern network switches perform various network infrastructure tasks and as a result use considerable power.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) is a relative new technology introduced into modern network switches. PoE switch ports provide power for network devices as well as transmit data.

PoE switch ports are used by IP phones, wireless LAN access points, and other network attached equipment. PoE switch port can provide power to a connected device and can scale back power when not required.

The Green Strategies

One solution is to use a highly efficient power supply within the network switch. By using a highly efficient power supply we can save up to 800 W.

Another solution is to use power management software built into the network switch. With power management software, we can instruct the network switch to turn off ports when not in use.

Power Usage In A Data Center The main issue with Data Centers, with respect to

Green Networking, is their inefficient use of electrical power by the Data Center components. In addition, electrical power generation from coal becomes a critical issue.

Data centers store a vast amount of data used on a daily basis by users, companies, government, and academia. As the demand for data has increased so has the size of Data Centers.

Consequently, the power consumed has also increased. In 2003, a typical Data Center consumed about 40 Watts per square foot energy, and in 2005 this figure has been raised to 120 Watts/sq ft energy and it is anticipated that this figure will continue to rise.

Power Usage In A Data Center

The Green Strategies

Due to the high power consumption by Data Centers, there are some proposed solutions to save energy and make Data Centers more energy efficient. Some of the solutions include :

Taking the Data Center to the power source instead of taking the power source to the Data Center

Consolidation and virtualization

Improved server and storage performances, power management

High efficiency power supplies

Improved data center design.

The Green Strategies

Traditionally the electrical power needed for Data Centers is supplied by the electricity grid. Using alternate energy sources at the Data Center is often impractical.

The solution is to take the Data Center to the energy source. The energy source could be solar, wind, geothermal, or some combination of these alternate forms of energy.

Instead of the power traveling great distances, the data would need to travel great distances. For this to be feasible, we would require a broadband network infrastructure.

Vision Of Green Network

The vision of a Green Network is one where we can all havethin clients using low energy consumption, connected viawireless to the Internet, where all our data is securely storedin highly efficient, reliable Data Centers typically runningat low energy per Gigabit per second speed. This can also include access to network services from Cloud computing service providers.

Whatever the future is, Green Networking will help reduce the carbon footprint of the ICT industry and hopefully lead the way in a cultural shift that all of us need to make if we are to reverse the global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Finally, the issue of Efficiency versus Consumption is an interesting argument, that is, efficiency drives consumption. ICT solutions cansolve efficiency; it is society that must solve consumption.

Now What To Do?

To enable a “Green Network”, we must be able to monitor and measure the savings associated with our green networking strategies in place.

A network energy efficiency baseline must be established from which we can measure improvements and compare them with the baseline.

We must look at ways to develop meaningful measurements to measure such power savings.

In a low carbon “Green Networking” environment, instead of considering bits per second (bps) we might need to consider watts/bit to measure energy inefficiencies or perhaps a better indicator would be bits per CO2 (b/co2).

Let’s

- David Brower, Environmentalist