Power and temperature

Power management is an increasingly important consideration in managing networks.

Adding sFlow counters to allow agents to report on power and temperature would provide useful information for power optimization.

/* Energy consumption */
/* opaque = counter_data; enterprise = 0; format = 3000 */
struct energy {
  unsigned hyper mJ; /* energy in millijoules */
  unsigned int pf; /* power factor (expressed as a percent), 0 for DC power */
}

/* Temperature */
/* opaque = counter_data; enterprise = 0; format = 3001 */
struct temperature {
   int oC<>; /* array of temperatures (1 for each thermometer) expressed in degrees Celsius */
}

Each measurement is scoped by the data source reporting it. In the case of energy, a switch might report total energy for the whole box (as measured by its power supply) and may also report energy for each of its PoE ports.

Adding these counters to sFlow (currently contained in proprietary SNMP MIBs if available at all) would provide an efficient, multi-vendor way to track power usage and temperature across all the devices and links in the network. SFlow counter polling is very efficient, providing a scalable way to monitor the large numbers of devices in a data center.

Peter
Received on Tue Jan 5 14:04:01 2010