The Greening of Enterprise Communications

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Green is good. Not just for the world’s environment, but also in terms of saving organizations money. Problem is, there are myriad ways of “going Green.” There are such things as green hardware, software, workflow procedures, and whole “Green” business models. Although an overall approach is best, it is possible to “pick and choose” what parts of your organization can go Green – shades of Green, as it were.

In the telecom world, a company may not even realize it has “gone Green,” since its carrier, service provider, and/or equipment vendors may have already instituted major changes without anyone else realizing it.

Up with Ethernet, Down with IP Routers as Packet Integrators

With the current economic environment, coupled with exploding bandwidth consumption and shrinking margins, lowering power consumption of a network not only helps save the environment, but helps profitability as well. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, of saving power is simply to choose a vendor with the lower power consumption per function provided. While this approach will save power (and every little bit helps), dramatically greater reductions can be realized through making a network more efficient.

To better understand how to make a network more efficient, one must first understand where the power is consumed in a network. IP networks are based upon the Open Systems (News - Alert) Interconnection Reference Model, a 7-layer protocol stack. In general, the higher up the stack you go, the more power is required per packet being transmitted, as greater amounts of CPU processing and high speed memory are needed. For example, at layer 2, a MAC table needs to be maintained, while moving to layer 3 results in MAC and IP lookup tables being maintained, as well as requiring a packet forwarding engine. Simply avoiding layer 3 until IP connectivity is absolutely needed can save substantial amounts of energy.

Similarly, there are several other techniques that may be used to make a network more power efficient. By leveraging longhaul technologies, an enterprise can skip active sites, leading to lower ‘Watts/bit/km’ of packets transported. Reducing the amount of signal regeneration that occurs in a network saves power (optical bypass is the most energy efficient way to deal with transit traffic), as does reducing the number of redundant layers of packet aggregation. The typical network today has multiple layers of packet aggregation, and collapsing these layers into a single aggregation layer can yield substantial benefits. Finally, enterprises should unify disparate networks into a single network. With today’s Ethernet demarcation techniques and low-cost CWDM and DWDM optics, there is simply no longer a need to run separate residential, business, wholesale, wireless, backhaul, and other networks. Combining them into a single multipurpose network dramatically lowers overall power per bit.

Jim Theodoras, Director of Technical Marketing at ADVA (News - Alert) Optical Networking, says, “While I applaud Enterprises adding power metrics to RFPs as a great first step, it simply will not be enough given the ongoing bandwidth explosion. Enterprises need to re-think their network architectures for more dramatic power savings. With current Ethernet demarcation and backhaul technologies, there is simply no need for gluttonous IP routers at every network site. Indeed, my Number One recommendation for improvement in enterprise network power consumption is to stop using IP routers as packet aggregators. IP routers are optimized for, well, routing, and contain a large amount of voracious high speed memory for their route tables. When the routes that packets take are fairly static, as is the case with aggregation, this memory sits idle, burning power for no net benefit. Packets can be aggregated and transported at lower layers of the network protocol stack before hitting their first router, thus yielding dramatic improvements in overall network power consumption. Indeed, the data that begins as an Ethernet packet can remain an Ethernet packet from edge-to-core.”

Theodoras says that service providers, for their part, should follow these tips:

• Choose a vendor with lowest power and smallest footprint per unit (lambda, port, bit);
• Leverage longhaul technologies and ROADMs to reduce intermediate regeneration;
• Push fiber and (passive) WDM closer to the end user – eliminate local exchanges;
• Aggregate multiple service networks onto a single optical backhaul network;
• Concentrate higher layer routing into fewer, more efficient data centers and Cos;
• Use service demarcation techniques to allow lower layer switching, aggregation, and backhaul all the way to the core

Green Initiatives in Hosted Telecom

One way to save for an enterprise to save money is simply to have as little customer premises equipment as possible, by resorting to a more efficient hosted service.

William Bumbernick, CEO of Alteva (News - Alert) (a telephone service provider serving everything from small businesses to large enterprises with a network specifically built for business VoIP), says, “Many communications technologies today are definitely ‘Green’ in that they may be collaboration applications that reduce travel requirements by keeping people connected without creating the carbon emissions or the gases associated with a face-to-face meeting. That’s a pretty common theme throughout the industry and it’s a way that companies such as ours and all the other collaboration-based providers help to market their services to those customers rightfully concerned about the environment.”

“Our core product is hosted IP Centrex,” says Bumbernick, “but it goes a bit further in terms of a Green initiative than some of the premises-based PBX (News - Alert) solutions. Ours is hosted in a data center. Our facilities can support hundreds of thousands of users at a fraction of the power and carbon footprint of a traditional PBX. For example, if a company buys and installs a PBX on-site, there are power requirements, not to mention the associated plastics and metals and toxics that were used in creating the PBX. The company next door does the same thing. You multiply this approach times hundreds of thousands of companies, and you can see that a level carbon consumption occurs that’s totally unnecessary.”

“In our hosted model, however,” says Bumbernick, “we have one platform, one facility – and a backup facility, of course – that offers all of the same switching capabilities as a premises-based PBX, at a reduced power consumption of about 84 percent for power and cooling. Based on our subscriber base and the reduction of the premises-based equipment, we estimate that our model saves about 900,000 pounds in reduced carbon dioxide emissions per year. That’s equal to the carbon emissions from 64 average homes for an entire year.”

“Almost all of our IP infrastructure components are hosted through VMware,” says Bumbernick. “So, we have much less hardware than you’d think to offer up the same amount of serving power that runs our entire infrastructure. We have a fully redundant live communications server environment – Microsoft (News - Alert) OCS and Exchange – that’s hosted across three servers serving tens of thousands of users. You’ll be seeing more and more virtual and resilient infrastructures in the form of such ‘cloud’ operating systems.”

Employees Not-on-the-Move

Verint (News - Alert) Systems is a leading provider of “Actionable Intelligence” solutions for enterprise workforce optimization and security intelligence. Its Verint Witness Actionable Solutions offers contact center software and services that can help organizations improve everything about how they deliver customer service, particularly via workforce optimization solutions that can provide visibility into customer service processes, workforce performance, and customer intelligence.

Verint takes the whole “telecommuting” or “teleworking” phenomenon in stride, touting the fact that by reducing or eliminating worker commute miles, organizations can cultivate their “green” image while actually helping reduce carbon and other emissions. Work-at-home agents have been used in contact centers for many years now, but the number of teleworkers is increasing, which has led to the development of specific work-at-home operating models, such as what Verint calls “seldom-see” and “never-see” business models. In the “seldom-see” model, the agent spends only one or two days per month in the physical contact center. In “never-see” models, the agent works exclusively from home.

Other organizations are moving to the famous (or infamous) outsourced company-contractor model, wherein agents may be required to purchase their own equipment according to company specifications. This helps avoids recovery costs and issues upon employee termination, and reduces early employee attrition because the agent has a literal financial stake in his or her own success. As Bill Durr, principal global solutions consultant for Verint Witness Actionable Solutions, says, “More commonly, agents spend three or four days per week in the physical contact center and only one or two days a week working at home. This casual approach to working at home is the easiest to adopt and typically requires the fewest changes to implement.”

Green With Envy?

Perhaps we’re looking at all this from the wrong end of the microscope. Anything in the business world that is more efficient and saves money is almost always green. So, we’re really talking about streamlining and optimizing an organization, maintaining a hard ROI approach to everything, with the positive environmental aspects of doing so coming along for the ride. That argument makes for a better selling point. “Green” can be equated as much with greenbacks as the natural environment – it’s just a change in perspective. IT

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group.

ADVA Optical Networking (News - Alert) - (www.advaoptical.com)

Alteva - (www.altevatel.com)

Verint Systems - (www.verint.com)

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