tony, agree that saving power is a worthwhile goal;
in fact existing hardware technology is making that happen today by e.g. automatically shutting down unused lookup engines, CPU cores, memory banks etc. when there is low processing demand. the part where i am not yet convinced is that additional off-peak "optimization" of infrastructure links by e.g. computing a routing mesh which only uses 70% of the nominal links does actually give much power savings. note that line cards which are running at 70% have already throttled down their power consumption - so what is the point emptying the link and loading another ? appears to me a zero sum game. my concern about the core (and SP edge) is not about business or technology - it is more about if we try to optimize an already optimized (and solved) problem. /hannes On Feb 7, 2013, at 5:09 PM, Tony Li wrote: > > On Feb 7, 2013, at 5:07 AM, Hannes Gredler <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Do you think that optimizing a part of the network which gives only limited >> overall savings is a worthwhile goal ? > > > Hannes, > > I'll just point out that this argument that you and Eric are espousing is > skirting dangerously close to the quagmire of business. And we know from > long experience that the IETF does not do business models. > > I'd like to strongly suggest that we simply restrict ourselves to the goal of > saving power. I think that we can agree, in general, that saving power is a > worthwhile goal. As to whether or not it is significant or makes economic > sense is very much an issue that should be left to the operator community to > decide. Limited overall savings may be worthwhile in one context and > pointless in another. > > I know of one country where they are purportedly mandating power reductions. > In such situations, saving that last watt is the difference between a fine > and not. On the other hand, in a situation where power is very cheap, it's > obviously silly. > > Let's not argue about the marginal value of energy. That's a business model > issue. Let's talk about how technology can actually save power. > > Regards, > Tony > > _______________________________________________ rtgwg mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rtgwg
