The Elements of a Green Network

There is clear evidence that working towards a green network is not only beneficial in terms of the cost savings associated with power consumption but also delivers a futureproof resilient network that can sustain the risks associated with climate change.

These risks, such as flooding and limited access to power, need to be included in current business continuity and disaster recovery planning to ensure ongoing business success. The benefits of green networking can also lead to reduced operational costs, reduced power usage, increased network & power efficiency.

To obtain a full understanding of the benefits of moving towards green networking an analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the existing network needs to be completed. TCO refers to the cost of the network lifecycle, including all costs paid by operators in purchasing and deploying equipment, implementing, and maintaining until the end of life.

Area's involved in the analysis are:

  • Building infrastructure
  • Server, computing and storage
  • LAN
  • WAN

Green competitiveness can be interpreted in terms of lifecycle, dividing resources consumed in various stages of the period into four categories: materials, manpower, energy, and land, and thus deriving a sound framework for the green evaluation system.

  • Materials: physical resources purchased by operators for network operation, such as equipment and supplementary engineering materials. 
  • Manpower: labour cost spent by operators in the process of network development and operation.
  • Floorspace: floorspace resources used by operators to place network equipment.
  • Energy: energy consumed by operators' networks, mainly referring to power and cooling resources.

All this information already exists within the customers financial and management systems. we will complement this with technical and structural analyzes:

  • Number and class of elements
  • Systems and network structure (centralized, distributed, ...)
  • Efficiency and pollution value of equipment used
  • Operational and design process

Review device hardware configuration, where we will analyze power consumed versus resource (KPBP,Mbyte,MIPS), this eventually supported by online or offline measurements of our analyzers.

Analysis of Energy Consumption

Cavell can work with you to analyse your energy consumption and determine your kW/Mb with our Power Consumption Testing service, read more here....

Solutions

According to the above analysis, to reduce IT systems energy consumption, we can adopt the following technical and management methods.

Technical Actions

Overall design and planning: Adopt rational design, planning and optimization schemes to minimize power consumption.

Equipment: Adopt solutions to reduce the energy consumption of equipment, this reviewing hardware configuration(boards/power-supplies) of current hardware, or migration to more optimal power and pollution-free solutions

Building and environment: Adopt solutions for intelligent & best practice ventilation and structural options (e.g. impact of POE).

Management Actions

Management means refer to reducing energy consumption with daily operation and maintenance mechanism, including monitoring temperature in equipment rooms, travel, daily cleaning of air conditioners. Although such work is very detailed, it is easy to implement, and can often produce instant results.

Cavell Green Networking

Our Green Networking service will deliver:

  1. Competative analyzes of your ‘green environment'.
    1. Our analyst will collect and extract information from your financial and operational systems. A technical experts will high level review your systems and network setup and structure.
    2. You will be provided with a competitive analyzes report of how your business is ranking within comparable industries. The report will also analyze the different components and how ‘green' they are. 
  2. Technical analyzes of your green environment
    1. Our technical experts will analyze the structure, deployed hardware, office and DCenviroment and operational processes.
    2. You will be provided with a report analyzing the Power and waste consumption per IT category. This including a set of recommendations for improvement.
  3. Detailed advice on ‘green' and cost improvements
    1. Using the data from above, our technical experts will meeting with your design and operational staff, this creating steps within the choosen categories to improve. This could include creating test/lab setups in which we actually test and prove improvements and your systems functionality.
    2. You will be provided with detailed analyzes, suggestions and systems and network designs to improve your environmental status. Optionally our engineers and project managers will (assist) in implemenation of these changes.
  4. Services
    1. All 3 elements mentioned above can be provided on a ‘one off' or as a yearly maintenance contract, where we would continiously monitor and guide the technology, operational and environmental aspects of your company

Evaluation of Green Benefits

The reasons for moving towards environmental networking are becoming more and more evident to ensure on-going business survival, for more information on this click here.