1. Make Our Network Green, Love Our Earth
Earth Day is observed on April 22 each year, which reminds us of protecting our
world in every way we can do. Nowadays, we hardly live without modern technology,
electrical energy, natural gas, coal, petrol, renewable energy sources and
non-renewable energy resources, etc. even most organizations and enterprises
hardly work without network. So when Earth Day of 2013 is approaching, what we
can do for our earth as a netizen? Here we will list some tips to make your green
networking.
Firstly let’s get to know what green networking is.
Green networking is the practice of selecting energy-efficient networking
productsand technologies, and minimizing resource use whenever possible.
Green networking practices include:
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.
Although investing in green networking may require an initial cash outlay, the
products and practices involved typically save money once put in place.
It is more important than ever to make sure your network and datacentre is running
efficiently as part of a green networking strategy to cut hardware and software costs,
save on power and contribute to corporate environmental policies.
Organisations can improve their power efficiency through taking out redundant
networking equipment that draws power. There is also now the option of turning to
cloud-based applications and networking deployments to cut energy consumption.
Companies that can afford it can also replace their networking routers and switches
with more power-efficient hardware.
Steve Salmon, principal advisor at KPMG’s CIO Advisory practice, saysgreen IT must

2. make financial sense for organisations. He says legacy environments are already
being made as efficient as possible through virtualisation technologies, such as
increasing server processing capacity use from below 10% to 75% and over.
Salmon says: "It can be easy for organisations to claim improved 'IT greenness' but
how many are simply achieving this by outsourcing the problem?
"In many cases current reporting requirements do not require this to be factored into
the equation, but this is likely to change. If and when it does, organisations may find
themselves back to square one."
Suppliers' Green Credentials
Supply chain transparency is a key element in evaluating true green IT credentials,
says Salmon, which is also a big challenge for outsourcers.
In one case, a KPMG client wanted to understand the carbon impact of procuring
WAN (wide area network) services from an international telco, and how that
organisation planned to reduce impact over time.
This was a virtual environment, with networks being shared by multiple clients across
a number of providers. "It was a tough ask that couldn’t, at the time, be answered by
the vendor," says Salmon.
Monitor Energy Consumption
Brian Murray, principal consultant at IT consultancy 2e2, says firms must first monitor
and understand their energy use if they want to better manage costs and
performance when moving towards green networking.
However, research from 2e2 has shown that 70 percent of IT departments don't
know how much energy their datacenter used. "Without this knowledge actually
attempting to reduce energy bills and become greener will be difficult, if not futile,"
says Murray.
Once organizations have a full overview of where energy is being used, from switches
to servers, and how much it is costing them, they need to find ways to bring it under
control. But Murray warns that immediately ripping out existing equipment may not
be the most energy-efficient way to proceed.
Organizations should first make sure they are using the datacenter management
resources they already have to their best potential. They should then manage their
assets so that equipment is replaced with more environmentally-friendly alternatives
as it is retired. "This ensures a smooth and affordable progression without affecting
the datacenter’s performance," he says.

3. Cost of Redundancy
Murray Sherwood, managing director for worldwide professional services at Fusion
Business Solutions, says that, until recently, many organisationsemphasised
redundancy to improve network availability in the event of component failures,
through back-up equipment.
Such equipment uses large amounts of energy even while not being used and in
some cases fails anyway – just as it did in last year's worldwide BlackBerry network
outage.
Sherwood says: "Now, with the availability of more robust networks, redundancy has
become built-in to such an extent that there is a good case for not implementing
huge amounts of back-up equipment."
In the BlackBerry outage it wasn't so much the failure of the back-up equipment that
was the problem, but the fact BlackBerry network owner RIM did not have an
alternative network route for the international data traffic stuck in its UK datacentre.
Although network kit is now more reliable, firms must make sure they have an
alternative traffic route to avoid outages.
Cloud Cuts Power
Organizations using the cloud should be able to benefit from more efficient and
greener network equipment used by their suppliers, while at the same time those
providers will often have alternative network routes planned for their customers'
data if a connection failure happens.
"Cloud can arguably reduce carbon consumption overall because applications are run
in a dedicated environment and with a more sophisticated datacentre
infrastructure," says Sherwood.
KPMG's Salmon agrees, up to a point. He says: "On the surface outsourcing
appropriate infrastructure and application services to cloud providers can provide
consumers with an optimal green IT footprint."
If the providers’ services meet the cloud characteristics of pay-per-use and
on-demand capacity, then the consumer will only pay for the storage, compute and
application service provision they use. Their carbon footprint should be reduced
accordingly.
But Salmon says efficiency comes down to the design and operation of cloud
datacentres and the capability of the suppliers to provide this level of detail in
reporting to consumers. "The cloud providers are lagging behind in many cases",
warns Salmon.

4. Power Usage Effectiveness
Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to determine the energy efficiency
of a datacentre, and is increasingly being considered by firms looking to improve
their own datacentres or finding an outsourced facility.
PUE is determined by dividing the total amount of power used in a datacentre by the
power used to run the computer infrastructure within it, after taking account of
cooling, lighting and other energy factors. PUE is therefore expressed as a ratio, with
overall efficiency improving as it decreases towards 1.
The current PUE industry average is around 1.8 according to some estimates, so
there remains a long way to go for some datacentres. PUE was created by industry
body Green Grid, which focuses on finding energy-efficient datacentre systems.
Sentrum, a datacentre operator, recently published a survey of 100 senior IT
executives involved in their firm's datacentres. Most say PUE is now an important
factor in running their own datacentre or choosing external datacentre capacity.
The survey found 62% of the companies surveyed are now measuring the PUE of
their datacentre projects, with 72% setting targets for power usage and associated
power cost reductions.
More Notes
FIVE TIPS TO IMPROVE NETWORK ENERGY EFFICIENCY
1. Remove large amounts of unnecessary data from your network. Using data
compression, de-duplication and releasing unused storage can help reduce
energy consumption.
2. Measure how much power is used by your servers and identify inefficient
hardware through monitoring the amount of useful activity across physical
and virtual servers. Most servers are estimated to be used less than 15% of
the time they are powered on, with idle hardware using as much as 90% of
operating power consumption. Virtualisation allows a business to power off
any physical servers that are not in use.
3. Consider fanless switches when used in open smaller scale deployments such
as classrooms, retail outlets and open plan offices.
4. Consolidate server rooms and datacentres by deploying larger switches when
appropriate for data demand. With a 10 Gigabit switch, for instance, fewer
switches are needed to aggregate the same bandwidth to servers, which
would otherwise be provided by teaming network cards in a server.
5. Consider power over Ethernet (PoE) networking deployments. PoE devices
enable an IT manager to make power-rationing decisions centrally for all PoE
devices, by configuring the application through the switches to give greater
control over energy consumption. PoE can be used for voice over IP (VoIP),
CCTV, entry systems, intercoms and a number of other applications.

5. Welcome to share your story of green networking. Let’s make our network
green!Love our life, love our world, and love our future, Earth Day everyday.
More Networking News:
Four Key Networking Predictions for 2013