Energy consumption vs % utilization?

Wed Oct 27 11:13:07 UTC 2004

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