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IEEE Seeks For Ethernet To 'Go Green'
alphadogg submitted a piece at the NetworkWorld site about the IEEE's efforts to introduce energy efficiency to Ethernet use. The group's Energy Efficient Ethernet group is looking into methods by which standards can be tweaked to encourage power savings. Current plans include ways to make computers 'choosier' about what level of bandwidth they're using. Idle systems would only run at 10Mbps, while email might draw 100Mbs, and scale up to 1000Mbps for large downloads and streaming video. The group is planning to discuss changes to the Ethernet link and higher layers. No restrictions are planned for device manufacturers, although the article suggests some companies might try to use energy efficiency as a competitive advantage. The EEE group estimates some $450 million a year could be saved via the use of energy efficient Ethernet technology.
Seems they are saving energy by throttling bandwidth for the article. Any manage to read it?
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Once Apple adds the ability to negotiate EEE in Macs, they'll call it iEEE.
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Use more zeros and fewer ones.
One of the easiest ways that the Ethernet people could encourage energy efficiency would be by promoting greater use of Power Over Ethernet. By moving networked devices away from each having an individual wall wart, which are typically inefficient (as well as inconvenient), PoE lets you concentrate the AC to DC conversion in one place, for greater efficiency. As long as you don't have terribly long cable runs, I think there would be a significant net savings overall.
The number of networked devices people are going to have in their homes is only going to grow. I think a big segment could be in "Micro NAS" devices, basically single HD boxes that plug in to a home network and add storage that's accessible from any computer in the home. They're smaller and cheaper than RAIDed NAS solutions, but more convenient for people who have multiple computers than a FireWire or USB2.0 hard drive. And then you have routers, WiFi APs, network cameras, set-top-boxes for playing back video and audio, etc. All of those light-draw devices could be powered over the network connection instead of each having a wall wart.
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Another suggestion - Stop all the spamming. There must be a coal-powered powerplant's worth of electricity right there.
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Sounds like someone is really starting at the wrong end. IMHO.
I'd estimate that power supply inefficiency chews up more than this proposal will ever save. If you spent your time making the power supplies of PC's, Switches, routers more efficient you'd probably have a greater impact. How about better efficiency in the FET's, transistors and amplifier circuitry? Last time I checked, my Ethernet looms didn't get that hot. (isn't it all about "(i^2).R"?. Heck turning off the light in the switch room probably does more to save power. Plus all the heat im my server room is from the servers, not the Ethernet. If your that worried, switch to fiber.
I thought the transfer of data at the physical layer was through the transfer of 'holes' anyway.
Does 100 (or 1000) really take that much power to download one "file", or is it the same amount of power used, just in a shorter time period?
Or is it power used while idle? Does a 1000 device comsume more power idling in that mode than a 10 device would?
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...is this group led by ethernet equipment vendors? Perhaps vendors who are unhappy with the recent decline in equipment upgrades since people aren't upgrading from gigabit or even to gigabit from 100mbit in a way that helps their stock price sufficiently?
It seems to me that, considering the number of ports active out there, they're talking about a tiny amount of savings per port for a total investment that could have a much larger effect if spent elsewhere.
Hell, I bet more power is wasted by the power supplies, overly conservative fan controls, uncleaned air filters, shorted out UPS batteries that should have been replaced decades ago, overpowered CPUs, and crappily written firmware of the currently deployed switches than is consumed by transmission losses.
For broadcom Ethernet PHY chips, they use about 1W/port when configured as 1000BaseT (GigE). GigE require some heavy duty DSP filtering as well as driving 4 pairs of bidirectional transceiver. They would burn less power when they are running at 100BaseT which only to drive 1 pair of receive and transmit. Not sure if there are significant saving going down to 10BaseT as the number of transmit pairs and the DSP's are dominant.
While this might not seem a whole lot of power, when you are looking at Enterprise size (say a few hundreds to thousands ports) setup, there can potentially be savings at the few hundred watts to thousand watts range.
At an office I once worked, there were a lot of spare switches laying about after upgrading to 1000BaseT. They were considered "spare" or whatever, but there was a great many... so I sorta brought one home and mounted it into my rack and used it for a couple of months. The next two electric bills made me rethink how nice it looked to have a 24 port switch in my rack instead of that cheapy 8 port sitting on a shelf. It consumed a NOTABLE amount of power. Now, there were other things involved I'm sure... things like the changes of the seasons, global warming and all that. But when I brought the switch back to the office and went back to my cheapy 8 port again, I saw a change in my power bill.
If I ever decide to spend money on a nice looking switch, I'll be sure to reference the power draw of the units I review.
Actually, it is pretty surprising how much current Gigabit takes- The output drives usually work in a current mode, and they draw 40mA per pair- since gigabit uses 4 pairs, that's 160mA on each end of a gigabit link. *But* the big difference is in what happens when the link is idling- 10mbit only puts through link test pulses, but 100Mbit and Gigabit both keep up idle patterns that are basically encoded strings of no information- this keeps both ends of the link ready to accept data- 10Mbit has to transmit a synchronization series of pulses to make sure both ends are clocking at the same rate. For 100 and gig, at least to the output drivers, they draw the same amount idling or transmitting at line-speed.
So a straight-through is: Green white / Green / Green white / Green / Green white / Green / Green white / Green Sweet. Crossovers then would be: Green white / Green / Green white / Green white / Green / Green / Green / Green white So much easier to remember! Thanks, IEEE!
Given the number of times that autonegotiation has given me headaches because supposedly compliant devices couldn't agree on how to setup a connection, I wouldn't want to set this up on any of my networks. I just can't see myself explaining to the CIO that the reason that the ERP is slow to the point of being unusable is because the core switches renegotiated their bandwidth down to 10Mbit/sec overnight when they were unused and were unable to ramp it back up again correctly. There is a reason that autonegotiation is often disabled & it's called experience...
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