nanog mailing list archives

Re: Energy consumption vs % utilization?


From: Andre Oppermann <nanog-list () nrg4u com>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:13:07 +0200


Nik Hug wrote:
From: "Andre Oppermann"

From running a Colo in a place with ridiculus high electricity engery
costs (Zurich/Switzerland) I can tell you that the energy consuption
of routers/telco (70%) and servers (30%) changes changes significantly
throughout the day.  It pretty much follows the traffic graph.  There
is a solid base load just because the stuff is powered up and from there
it goes up as much as 20-30% depending on the routing/computing load of
the boxes.  To simplify things you can say that per packet you have that
many "mWh" (milli-Watt-hours) per packet switched/routed or http requests
answered over the base load.  I haven't tried to calulate how much energy
routing a packet on a Cisco 12k or Juniper M40 cost though.  Would be
very interesting if someone (student) could do that calculation.

the same variation between night and day here - but from our point of view
the consumption of the air-pack's are making the differences during the day
...  traffic-graph and outside temperature-graphs show more or less the same
up and down. Would we interesting to have separate values for the power
consumption between server-equipment and air-co ...

In this case the air-co is not included.  That is measured on a separate
circuit for which I don't have any figures ready.

Also note that especially high-end routers draw power load dependent.  With
SONET/SDH stuff I haven't seen it.  The reason is circuit switching.  They
switch continuously the same amount of data.

--
Andre


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