LAN Energy Efficiency Opportunities Green Paper
November 17, 2011
A paper by our colleagues at Cirrant Partners Inc. highlights the “scotoma” or blind spot of the existing IT Network energy management model and provides a perspective to the future paradigm in IT Network Infrastructure. This unmanaged energy, a large amount of which is presently being consumed unnecessarily, due to insufficient incentives, representing billions of dollars wasted.
The enterprise best practices today, for the build out of LAN infrastructure, are locked into a copper cabling medium with a 100 meter limitation necessitating switching hardware based on a 3-tier architectural design. This copper based design, while it has served the industry well over the last 20 years along with the growth of the Internet, has scalability that results in diseconomies.
Standards based technologies are available which can be used to dematerialize much of the hardware that is currently manifested in the 3-tier architectural design, via a hybrid design consisting of fiber, wireless, and copper. This new design can diminish the need of wiring closets throughout a building and significantly reduce the power consuming HVAC, real estate space, and administrative costs.
Dematerialization by itself will result in significant CAPEX and OPEX savings.
From the case study illustrated in this report the potential savings of the new LAN design instead of the copper based infrastructure resulted in power savings of 66% and CAPEX savings of 33%.Additionally, savings in the cabling infrastructure build out time, 96 staff-weeks to 24 staff-weeks, were achieved.
Billions of kWh of energy are now ready for harvesting, which will only occur if the necessary cross-discipline management practices and the right incentives are in place.
This White Paper can be obtained at: http://www.cirrant.com/resources.html/
