Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

Why Green Ethernet is the New Competitive Imperative and the Three Steps to Get There Fast

Practice

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

Introduction
The market for Ethernet gear continues to be one of the largest revenue opportunities for telecommunications September, 2009 equipment manufactures globally, with carrier Ethernet alone surging to over $140B. With the evolution Over the 5 years from 2009 to 2013, we expect service providers of cloud computing, and the rise in popularity of worldwide to spend a cumulative $ 146 billion on Carrier Ethernet equipment applications such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, the amount of data stored in the almost always out-of Michael Howard, Principal analyst, Carrier and Data Center Networks sight data center has grown to staggering proportions the number of servers in the United States alone has quintupled between 1997 and 2007. Data centers now account for almost 1% to 2% of the worlds electricity consumption to put this into perspective, annual power consumption from data centers is larger than the electricity consumption of the entire country of Sweden. Hence, the competitive landscape and customer criteria for equipment purchase have changed dramatically in the recent past, and green requirements have made their way to the very top of the buying criteria. According to Gartner, environmentally friendly IT ranks among the top trends and technologies beyond 2008. The main driver for the green revolution has been the fact that it goes beyond eco-friendliness, and directly impacts the bottom line.
A quick evaluation of the power consumption profile in a Data center is illustrated in Figure 1. From the calculation here, it can be seen that network equipment in data center alone accounts for between $1.7 billion and $3.46 billion dollars worldwide in energy expenses. Further, this number does not account for the amount of energy used by networking equipment in enterprises or in service provider networks. With Ethernet rapidly accounting for a majority of the equipment in all sorts of networks, equipment makers are scrambling to evolve to green Ethernet solutions across metro, enterprise, industrial, and datacenter segments to ensure competitive access to the significant Ethernet equipment market moving forward. While most literature associated with green revolution in the context of telecom equipment has focused on metrics for the greenness of a switch and benchmarking energy efficiency of different Ethernet switching equipment, there has been precious little published that helps equipment manufacturers answer the million dollar question How can I make my switch green?. In this whitepaper, we address the need for going green from an equipment manufacturers perspective, look at the individual components inside an Ethernet switch, and identify three concrete steps by which it can be made green quickly.

Electricity generation worldwide in 2010

20.6 Trillion KWh

%age of global electricity used by Data Centers Annual electricity consumption by Data Centers

1%

2%

206 Billion KWh

10% 3%

412 Billion KWh

Power consumption distribution in a Data Center

25% 12%

50%

Cooling

Network Equipment

Servers

Power Loss

Lighting

Electrical consumption by Network Equipment

24.72 Billion KWh

49.44 Billion KWh

Electrical Cost related to Network Equipment

$1.73 Billion

$3.46 Billion

Figure 1: Network Equipment Energy Expenses in Data Centers

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

What is Driving Equipment Manufacturers Towards a Green Ethernet

Sure, going green can help end customers reduce expenses and also position them as good corporate citizens who care for the planet. But, what are the exact changes precipitating in the business environment that are driving equipment manufacturers to take their products for a tour down the green alley? Regulatory requirements Multiple countries, including the European Union, U.S.A., China, and South Korea, have begun to impose regulations on all IT imports which put restrictions on hazardous materials, recyclability, and other risks. The Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a set of regulations defined in 2008 which restrict the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic Equipment. These regulations implement EU Directive 2002/95 which bans new electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed to levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants from the EU market. This is one of the biggest steps in recent networking history towards make networking gear greener and environmentally friendlier. Cost and space savings As indicated in the previous section, the number of servers in data centers has quintupled in the U.S. alone in the last ten years. This has led to the extreme pressures in terms of availability of rack space to deploy the servers and networking equipment in. Hence, space efficient designs such as blade servers, rack-top switches have gained popularity. Also, increased computing and networking gear in the limited space requires additional cooling, and hence, increases energy consumption requirements. Thus, there has been a switch towards virtualized configurations and technologies such as Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), which aim at reducing the amount of physical hardware deployed, and consequently, the power consumption at the data center. Procurement policies According to a recent Gartner study, the Green IT has been listed to be of importance to their organizations by more than 80% of executives, more than 50% of enterprises include greenness as a criterion in choosing vendors, more than 1/3rd of the enterprises place importance on their vendors having green offerings.

February, 2009
The broad area of green IT covering areas such as, carbon reporting and offsetting, videoconferencing and green procurement will continue to be a key pillar of IT strategy and architecture during the next 10 years Rakesh Kumar, Research Vice President

New standards The cause for greenness in telecommunications equipment has been embraced by standards bodies worldwide. IEEE has issued the worlds first Ethernet standard strictly directed at power reduction. The IEEE 802.3az Energy-efficiency Ethernet standard has been forwarded to ballot with the goal of getting approval in September 2010. Similarly ATIS has published three standards in March 2009 to determine telecommunication equipments energy efficiency. Green branding Network equipment buyers need to show demonstrable proof of their plans and progress in evolving their networking infrastructure towards more environmentally sensitive solutions. As a result, green branding is top on the mind for many equipment vendors, e.g., DLink has undertaken a DLink Green initiative to showcase the environment friendliness of its Ethernet switches.

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

What Makes a Switch Green?

Most, if not all, equipment manufacturers face certain common questions as they seek to make their switches green. Can it be achieved with re-engineering existing hardware platforms and software? Is it essential to invest in a building a new product ground-up, with green written all over it? As can be seen in Figure 2, different components of an Ethernet switch contribute differently to the overall power consumption profile of the switch. To answer the questions related to making a switch green, it is necessary to understand how the figures indicated in Figure 2 can be optimized to minimize energy consumption within the switch, and hence, the heat dissipated by it. Typical Power Consumption 1G Ethernet Port (GbE) (Idle) 10G Ethernet Port (Idle) 24 Fast Ethernet (FE) + 2 GbE Switch (Idle) 24 FE + 2 GbE Switch (2 Links fully utilized) Cooling System Power consumption per meter 10 to 15 Watts 20 to 35 Watts 35 Watts 45 Watts 0.358W per watt used by switch 0.3 to 0.5 Watts for GbE port

Figure 2: Examples of Power Consumption in an Ethernet Switch

Dimensions of Green Ethernet

Component Efficiency

Power Management

Resource Utilization

Shelf Life

Hardware

CPU Switching Fabric I/O Ports

Power Supply Quality Power Monitoring Support Rate Limiting Support

Resource Allocation

Platform Flexibility

Integrated Services Support

Configuration Support

Software
CPU Optimization LLDP Power Negotiation Memory Optimization Power Policy Enforcement Energy Saving Protocols I/O Interface Efficiency Ease of Feature Enhancement Virtual Switching Support Scalable Architecture

Figure 3: Sample Criteria for Evaluating the Green Factor of an Ethernet Switch

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

Component and Software Efficiency

The efficiency of an Ethernet switch is defined by the power consumed by the switch versus the amount of work performed by it. While the computation of efficiency has been defined by standards such as ATIS, this efficiency is driven by both the efficiency of the hardware components used therein as well as the feature-set and artifacts of the software implementation. Energy efficiency can be optimized only with an in-depth evaluation of both the hardware and software aspects of the switch. The choice of hardware components such as the CPU, switching fabric, I/O ports and their suitability for the function being performed by the switch play a big role in determining its energy efficiency. From a software perspective, energy efficiency is governed by ensuring effective utilization of hardware components, as well as the choice of energy-saving protocols and features implemented on the switch.

Power Management
Power is essential for every Ethernet switch, both for its functioning, as well as to take care of aspects such as heat dissipation. With the availability of advanced protocols such as Power-over-Ethernet (POE), electricity consumed by Ethernet switches is used to distribute DC power to devices such as IP phones and wireless LAN access points. To enable energy efficiencies, it is necessary to enable hardware and software optimizations which minimize dissipation related losses, as well as ensure optimal consumption of power at the multiple I/O interfaces on the switch.

Resource Utilization
The increase in processing power at data centers has resulted in requirements from networking equipment that the servers are connected to. This has led to a rapid increase in the number of Ethernet switches deployed, as well as the associated cabling required to connect servers to these switches. Virtualization is a concept which has revolutionized energy efficiency for traditional IT equipment such as servers. Extending this concept to routers and switches reduces the quantity of power-hungry hardware that needs to be deployed. Further, offering integrated services on a single piece of hardware, rather than deploy specialized network appliances helps improve the efficiency of available resources.

Shelf Life
From a pure ecological standpoint, equipment with short shelf life is bad for the environment as it results in millions of devices and components piling up in landfills every year. Going beyond, even from an economic perspective, end customers need to loosen their purses for capital expenditures in a short time frame. Hence, building future-proof and energy efficient hardware platforms and software architectures which easily accommodate upgrades and new technologies can help improve the green appeal of networking equipment.

3 Steps to Get Green Fast

As discussed in the previous section, there are multiple aspects to making a switch green. Although all of these go towards determining the overall energy efficiency of the Ethernet switch, some of these have a larger role to play than the others. Hence, for equipment manufacturers looking to get their switches green fast following are three items in each hardware and software, that can help them improve the green quotient of their equipment.

Hardware
From a hardware perspective, the most important aspects which have the largest impact towards getting a switch to be green include the processor, the power supply, and the pairing of different components on the switch to achieve the desired performance.

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

1. Processor As can be seen in Figure 4, the processor speed that can be driven by the same amount of power differs vastly across different processors. In general, while ARM and MIPS processors utilize lesser power than other processors, they are also less powerful. An important aspect to note with respect to Figure 4 is that Mhz alone does not provide an indication of processing power. Beyond mere clock speed, DMIPS (Dhrystone Million Instructions per Second) per MHz is an important factor which determines the processing power of a CPU. MIPS and ARM processors are well suited for lower capacity switches such as in Enterprise environments. For higher capacity requirements, more powerful processors are needed, and in these scenarios, utilizing multi-core architectures provide distinct power advantages over single core ones.

ARM11 ARM9 Intel Atom Power PC AMD Athlon 64 AMD Turion 64 Intel Core2 Duo Intel Core i5 Intel Pentium 4 5 5 5 4 3.5 Mhz Per 0.1 Watt of Power Used 20 20 100

200

Figure 4: Mhz Supported per Watt of Power Consumption

2. Power Supply All switches utilize a power supply PoE Connected Devices which converts AC mains power into the DC power Print Server 2 to 3 Watts required to both drive the core processing modules within a switch as well as provide power to different IP Phone 3 to 5 Watts equipment connected on the Power over Ethernet (PoE) Handheld Computer 3 to 5 Watts ports. Power supply units lose power when converting Magnetic Card Reader 5 to 8 Watts from AC to DC, which is the AC power dissipation, IP Security Camera 5 to 15 Watts associated with them. To improve the overall power consumption profile of the switch, careful attention Wireless Access Point 5 to 15 Watts needs to be paid to the choice of the power supply unit Laptop Up to 40 Watts and its efficiency. Figure 5 illustrates the typical amount Figure 5: Power Consumption for Typical PoE Devices of power used by end user equipment connected to PoE switches. From these numbers it can be seen that PoE-capable Ethernet switches need a substantial amount of power to support connected devices. While the efficiency of power supply units has increased with the move from linear power supplies to switched power supplies, it is still in the 70% range. Improving this efficiency factor by even 10% can result in significant benefits in terms of power efficiencies for the entire switch. 3. Component Pairing It is necessary to ensure that the different hardware components within a switch are optimally paired and best suited to address the needs of the market that the switch is designed to serve. The requirements in terms of speed and capacity required, number and types of physical ports supported, redundancy and carrier grade support, etc., determine what the ideal combination of components for the switch is. These requirements need to drive the choice of the CPU and switching fabric, which to a great extent determines the power consumption profile for the switch. Choosing highly powerful processors and high-speed switching fabrics, much beyond the current or anticipated capacity support required by the platform, is overkill and adversely impacts the green quotient associated with the switch.

Software
While hardware-related aspects contribute largely to the overall power consumption of an Ethernet switch, these can be controlled to a great extent by software features which control resource utilization as well can ensure optimal functioning of the hardware components which are the biggest consumers of the all-so-important power.

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

1. Processor Optimization Software-based techniques C-State Maximum Power such as minimization of polling, turning devices off Consumption when not in use, grouping timers used in software C0 (busy wait) 35 Watts (TDP) to reduce processor idle wakeups, and optimizing C1 13.5 Watts sleep duty cycles, can help reduce processor power consumption significantly. Power-performance can be C2 12.9 Watts further enhanced significantly by effectively utilizing the C3 7.7 Watts power management states supported by processors. For C4 1.2 Watts example, Intel processors support a set of C-states which are idle states. By switching between these states, an Figure 6: Processor Idle States for Intel Core 2 Duo operating system can reduce CPU power consumption as illustrated in Figure 6. However, switching across states needs to be done judiciously as deeper the C-State, the longer and more power intensive it is to return to the active state (e.g., the typical amount of time that a processor would require to wake-up from a C4 state is 185 milliseconds, which is not acceptable for Ethernet switching). Another dimension available for controlling processor power utilization is the processor P-state, which is a set of pre-determined frequency and voltage combinations at which the processor operates. If it is deemed that the load is low, the processor can be switched to a P-state which reduces the CPU frequency, and consequently the voltage and power consumption of the processor. These features are available on the new generation of embedded processors to dynamically throttle the processor frequency/voltage based on processor loads. 2. Energy Efficient Protocols Supporting certain protocols ensures that the hardware resources are utilized in an efficient manner and reduce power consumption on links to the ideal levels required by devices. Two important protocols in this regard include Link Layer Discover Protocol-Media End Point Devices (LLDP-MED) and Energy Efficient Ethernet (802.1az). LLDP Media End-point Devices (LLDP-MED): The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has extended the IEEE 802.1AB LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) standard to create the ANSI/TIA-1057 - Link Layer Discovery Protocol Media Endpoint Devices (LLDP-MED) specification. This standard enables endpoint devices like cameras, access wireless points or VoIP phones, to exchange configuration information such as highly granular PoE power allocation and power priorities to ensure that equipment draws only the required amount of power, and nothing more. Energy Efficient Ethernet (802.3az): The Energy Efficient Ethernet task force of IEEE has been working to develop the 802.3az standard for Energy Efficient Ethernet. It has been observed that activity on Ethernet links is typically bursty in nature, and significant power savings could be achieved by moving the link into an idle state during periods of no activity. While protocols such as LLDP can be used for this purpose, the latency associated with bringing a link back to the active mode from its idle mode is too high to make it viable for high speed switching. The proposed standard provides a protocol to reduce this latency using a low-power idle scheme. While the publication date for the standard is slated to be in September 2010 and only a draft version of the standard is currently, equipment manufacturers need to plan on incorporating support for this protocol, to ensure green parity with competition. 3. Energy Saving Features Energy saving features which can be implemented in software include: Virtual Switches: Service providers often need to segregate customer networks into physically or logically separate routing or Ethernet switching domains. To address such requirements, a powerful alternative to setting up multiple physical routers or switches is to use software based virtual routers or virtual switches, with multiple virtual routers or switches housed on the same physical node. This approach is similar to server virtualization, and helps conserve hardware resources, eliminates wastage, reduces carbon footprint and is an environmentally better alternative.

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

Power Supply Cycling: Power supply cycling offers switch designers a viable means to achieve the desired performance while maintaining low power consumption in their CPLD devices. For example, while a CPLD is be waiting for some communication on a serial interface, it may still be consuming power as a result of signals switching inside the device. As the amount of power consumed is directly proportional to the amount of processing undertaken, completing an operation in .1 seconds at 100MHz consumes same amount of energy as completing the same operation in 10 seconds at 1 MHz. This characteristic can be used to minimize the overall power consumption by compressing the required activity into a smaller time period and turning off the CPLD during periods of inactivity. Policy-based PoE and Intelligent Throttling/Shutdown: The power required to transport a signal over a distance increases with higher bandwidth transmissions. In particular, with networking, the power a network adapter uses at 1 G link speed is significantly higher (2 Watts or more) than the power used at 100 megabit link speed. While GbE is pretty much the de-facto standard for high-speed Ethernet, the entire capacity is not required at most times. Supporting mechanisms to reduce interface speed or to turn off PoE equipment based on policies such as time of day, day of week, idle time thresholds, etc., can provide significant improvements in power consumption by a switch.

How Can Aricent Help?

Aricents Ethernet solutions helps equipment vendors build high quality products across different Ethernet domains including Workgroup, Enterprise, Metro, Datacenter and Industrial networks that can be developed cost effectively, with lower risk and improved time to market. Aricent offers: An industry leading and field-proven software framework Intelligent Switching Solution (ISS) with functionality spanning multiple Ethernet domains, and field proven by most Tier 1 network equipment manufacturers A comprehensive portfolio of turnkey product lifecycle services to complement the software offerings and support OEMs on product strategy and design, product development, testing and certification, as well as on maintenance and support.

Aricents has a complete ecosystem for its Ethernet solutions built on strategic partnerships with all major silicon and chipset vendors. Additionally, Aricent has worked on Ethernet offerings for most Tier 1 customers and offerings based on our ISS platform are deployed globally. Armed with a deep understanding of the characteristics of the different components used for Ethernet switching as well as the best practices in terms of software architectures required to build power-efficient Ethernet switching solutions, Aricents Green Audit offering can help equipment manufacturers get a comprehensive evaluation of the green quotient associated with their solutions, and how to improve it. Aricents data communications practice is supported by over 2500+ consultants and engineers with deep domain expertise in Enterprise networks, Industrial networks, Carrier Ethernet Transport and Packet Optical Transport networks.
Green Audit Service
In-depth analysis of hardware and software aspects of Ethernet switch to quantify green quotient Specific recommendations to improve power utilization and energy efficiency of Ethernet Switching solution Platform re-engineering and product development services to implement efficiency improvement recommendations

Green Ethernet Equipment: Code Red

Conclusion
Equipment manufacturers can significantly improve the power consumption and energy efficiency of their Ethernet switching products by making appropriate decisions based on hardware and software design choices listed in this paper. Network operators and OEMs can leverage Aricents expertise, garnered from its widely deployed base of Ethernet switching solutions, to perform a green audit of their equipment and analyze whether they have an optimum green quotient and how they can make significant improvements in this area. Aricent also provides comprehensive product lifecycle services to help equipment manufacturers quickly address these requirements as well as develop on going products in this domain.

About Aricent
Aricent combines the leading innovation capabilities of frog design with unparalleled domain expertise in communications as a strategic supplier to the worlds foremost infrastructure, application and service providers. The companys investors include Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Sequoia Capital, The Family Office and The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. To learn more about Aricents Ethernet switching solutions, please visit www.aricent.com/ethernet.

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