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Energy Efficient Ethernet hits standards milestone

By Sean Michael Kerner on July 17, 2009 5:07 PM

From the 'standards don't happen overnight' files:

I've been writing about Energy Efficient Ethernet for over a year now, as the effort to make Ethernet more green, winds its way through the standards bodies.

This week the effort hit a standards milestone with the approval of a draft of the IEEE P802.3az Energy-Efficient Ethernet standard. Now the draft gets forwarded onward to become an IEEE working group ballot. The final standard according to backers is on track for a September 2010 final approval.

The goal of Energy Efficient Ethernet is to reduce Ethernet power consumption by 50 percent or more - which isn't a trivial thing to do.

"This is the first project in the history of Ethernet aimed specifically at reducing energy use," says Michael Bennett, Senior Network Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Chair, IEEE P802.3az, Energy Efficient Ethernet Task Force in a statement. "IT managers are faced with ongoing pressures to balance energy use and reduce energy costs. Reaching this milestone is an important step towards providing network designers with additional tools to reduce energy consumption."

So what is it all about? How can Ethernet power consumption be reduced?

I spoke with Alcatel-Lucent earlier this week about their new 100 GbE efforts - and during the conversation their execs had a slide on Energy Efficient Ethernet. In combination with the lower power Ethernet they are actually going to be able to deliver more bandwidth than ever while using less power.

When I spoke with the Ethernet Alliance about Energy Efficient Ethernet last year Brad Booth, president of the Ethernet Alliance industry association, told me that prior to 2008, Ethernet vendors didn't give much thought to power. That has changed.

"One of the things they're [the standards] looking at is to actually shut down and literally, physically turn off the physical layer device for a period of time and allow the device to take the line quiet," Booth said. "Then bring it up for a refresh every once in a while. By refreshing intermittently, it allows you to wake up quicker."

Overall and over time, reducing Ethernet power and using Ethernet as a way to manage power has huge implications. How many tens of millions of Americans leave their router fully powered overnight when they're not actually using the Internet? That's a power on state that pulls power at the consumer end and at the service provider side.

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