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If you’re in a conference session, and an Ethernet switch vendor tells you to use 10/100 instead of Gigabit wherever you can, you must be in a session on Green IT.

In this instance, it was an Interop session on “Deploying a Green IP Telephony Network,” and the speaker was Harpreet Chadha, senior director, product management at Extreme Networks. And besides the idea of curtailing (or at least not expanding) bandwidth, Harpreet suggested selectively powering down at least a portion of the IP phones in a given office when they’re not in use. He sketched out a scenario for a 200-person office that operates 9–5, Monday through Friday:

• Identify 150 non-critical desk phones
• Power down at 6 PM each evening, restart at 7 AM the next morning
• Power down over the weekend

The obvious result is that the company saves 75% on the cost of powering those phones during the down hours, and the more power-hungry the phones, the more the savings. Harpreet noted that the phones can be brought up sequentially over a period of time, so as to avoid overwhelming the DHCP server with a flood of registrations as they re-boot at 7 AM. However, in response to audience questions, he agreed that there does need to be a mechanism developed to override or otherwise deal with the fact that having the phones down could be a problem in a 911 situation for employees who are present after hours.

Another point of debate came up in response to the panel’s APC representative, Domenic Alcaro, who’d cited the statistic that datacenters consumed 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, at a cost of $4.5 billion; and that this consumption represented about 1.5% of the U.S.’s total electricity use.

The question was, essentially: So if our industry cuts its power consumption, say, by one-third, we’ve only taken 0.5% out of the nation’s power usage—is it worth it?

Well, besides saving the industry a billion and a half dollars, it’d take about 20.3 million tons of CO2 out of the environment. Simon Gwatkin of Mitel, in his presentation for the Interop panel, noted that the average household creates 5.5 tons of CO2 per year, so you’re eliminating the equivalent of 3.7 million households’ worth of pollution if you cut datacenter power usage by one-third.

Obviously, one industry isn’t going to solve the problem, but everyone can make a contribution, and when it comes to IT, we can be part of the solution beyond just cutting our own power consumption. I was talking with Fred Knight about an Interop session he attended in which a power company representative described the various economic incentives that the power generators themselves have to use technology in order to more closely monitor residential power consumption, and adjust dynamically.

It seems as if this is where the “smart home” movement should really be going. It’s not about the house playing your favorite music as soon as it senses you walking into the room—although in Vegas I also talked to Agito Networks about how they use location-tracking technology to force cellular-WiFi handoffs, so the technology is really a lot closer than you might think.

Instead, it’s about being able to schedule things like dishwashers to run in the middle of the night, during off-peak times, so that the power company doesn’t have to fall back on incredibly polluting energy sources to meet peak demand.

If we think differently about energy, we can use less of it and can deploy information technology to use it more wisely and efficiently. It should work….

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Green IT, Unified Communications, VOIP, Management |

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