Green Ethernet promises to save power, eventually by doug mohney

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• Doug Mohney

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   Jumping on the green bandwagon, the IEEE has issued the world’s first Ethernet standard strictly directed at power reduction.  “Green” Ethernet is a great idea, but it is going to take years before it shows up in products and may have little usefulness in an optimized data center.

   More specifically, the IEEE 802.3az Energy-efficiency Ethernet standard has been forwarded to ballot with the goal of getting approval in September 2010 – so about a year before it is an official standard by anyone’s definition.   The standard would switch links and devices off when network demand is low, providing another tool to reduce energy consumption.

   Having followed the development of wireless standards over the years, anything can happen before an official decision is made on 802.3az. September 2010 might be the “approved” date – or one vendor might decide to throw a fit and hold up the standard until it gets what it wants.  Further, there’s always the inevitable rounds of certifying that a vendor’s product is compatible to the standard and making sure that different products of different vendors all “play well” with each other under the new standard.  In a best case scenario, products certified to the standard might be available in the first half of 2011, with initial bugs – and there will be bugs – fixed by mid-2011.

   At the 10,000 foot level, there are two areas of concern for data center operators.   First, if it shuts links and devices off when network demand is low, it begs the question as to why network demand hasn’t been optimized so there is little, if any, idle equipment sitting around.  Symantec went through their data centers and figured out that, by consolidating resources on virtual servers and drives, it could actually shut down data centers and terabytes of disk storage – a much greater savings in terms of both power utilization and money because they had less real estate and equipment to manage and support.

   If you are a member of the professionally paranoid, you also may not be comforted by the concept of a way to remotely shut down devices due to “idle” network traffic.  This generation’s DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack utilizing thousands of remote servers to overload a network may turn into next-generation’s “Lights out” attack to shut down computing capacity at a critical moment.

   
   

   
   

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