Green IT in the Telecom Space

With the seemingly ever-increasing energy costs and the emphasis on improving the environment, the focus on “green-computing” is becoming much more intense. In the past, power usage wasn’t a major IT concern. Today power and cooling costs are a major component of IT budgets and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Data centers in California are estimated to require 250-375 MW of energy-the equivalent of 3,495-5,242 barrels of oil each day! The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org), founded in February 2007, is a growing organization seeking to define and propagate the best energy-efficiency practices in datacenter operation, design, and construction.

“While Green Computing is often viewed as an environmental initiative, the significant cost savings associated with energy efficient IT infrastructure is the true economic incentive for leading enterprises and service providers to embrace ’Green IT’.” - Jeff Kays, VP of Sales, Alliance Systems ISG Division.

Let’s explore what changes are happening in the datacenter energy-efficient designs and see how they might apply to applications within the enterprise and service provider arenas.

Power Trends

In a study conducted by The Green Grid, the rate of increase for heat density ranges from 7% annually for storage to as high as 28% for communications equipment. Trends shown in Figure 1 indicate an expected increase in all product categories through 2014.

Data Center Application success

A successful approach to improving the power and cooling efficiency in the data center requires best practices in all areas of design, deployment, and organization. The key design elements are floor layout and IT load. Floor layouts should be designed in such a way to reduce the impact of hot and cold aisles to reduce the load on air conditioning systems. Right sizing the IT load to the overall physical infrastructure will reduce the overall electricity consumed (reported as high as 50% in some data centers). The deployment of virtualization software consolidates the number of physical servers required for both current and future work loads. Lastly, organizing and consolidating the servers with a well defined upgrade and replacement strategy can dramatically improve space efficiency.

Can Green Computing Concepts Apply to Service Provider and Enterprise IP Telephony?

As today’s telecommunications networks grow in both size and complexity, enterprises and service providers alike are faced with an increasing burden on operating expenses that rival any large data center. The amount of power consumed and heat dissipated within even a single rack of communications servers is now a very real budget consideration. Clearly, lowering the heat produced and power consumed by high-density solutions is a goal of all communication platform designers. One primary difference between many of the data center applications and the IP telephony applications in the enterprise and Central Office is the challenge of supporting a large number PCI-X I/O cards. Solutions such as Call Logging, Video Processing, SS7 Gateways, and other custom board solutions requiring this level of I/O compound the design complexity in these environments. IP Telephony server platforms today are delivering higher performance in terms of multi-core processing power, storage capacity, and I/O bus speeds. Tier 1 OEMs (such as DELL, HP, and IBM) now support PCI Express slots but have reduced the number of available PCI-X slots in the process. The challenges that both enterprise and service providers now face are three-fold:

1. What solutions are available if my solution requires multiple I/O ports with add-on cards?

2. What are my thermal and power budgets when a large number of PCI-X I/O boards are required for the solution?

3. Can I still take advantage of the newer computing technologies cost effectively?

Expansion platforms are now available that can effectively address all three areas. Coupling a host machine with the latest processing power along with an expansion system that can house multiple PCI-X cards provides a best of breed solution. By combining the payload into one or two expansion systems, the amount of power and cooling required is reduced by nearly 50% in most cases. If the systems are designed with DC power, then the power and cooling budgets are typically reduced by 75% as compared to a rack full of 1U or 2U AC systems.

Final Score

In the end, enterprises and telcos are facing similar challenges as the data centers in terms of power, cooling, and space considerations. Each have their own unique set of challenges, but the common approach to DC power and improved system density will continue to lower the overall energy demands – ultimately helping our corporate wallets and the environment.

Jeff Hudgins is VP of Engineering at Alliance Systems. For more information, visit the company online at www.alliancesystems.com.

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