Thanks to a new standard from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE, Energy efficient Ethernet or EEE is picking up speed and could soon be coming to a data center near you!

On most Ethernet networks, computers and devices run at speeds of 100 megabit or 1 gigabit per second. Recent studies have indicated that most people use that full link speed an average of only 5-10 percent of the time! Keeping this in mind, on current network interface cards and devices, the chipset is most cases is consistently running at full throttle and thus consuming power. This inefficiency however does not have to be and is exactly what the newly formed Energy Efficient Ethernet group is tackling.  The new standard for energy efficient Ethernet or IEEE 802.3az as many techies will commonly refer to it as has the potential to save over 400 million each year and that’s in the US alone!  This my friends, is significant and could very well be the Home Run the Energy Efficient Ethernet group is aiming for.

Here’s how it works; the new standard defines a protocol that allows two devices communicating on an Ethernet network to communicate only when they have data packets to transfer. In essence, the administrative messages that are common in today Ethernet networks have been removed and devices on an Ethernet network communicate only when they have data packets to transfer. This eliminates the administrative messages that typically get transmitted on today’s Ethernet networks and allows for the devices to enter a type of low power mode when they are not in use. Networking technology manufacturers Hewlett Packard Broadcom and Intel, to name a few currently have an array of products that incorporate the EEE standard. Way to go guys! Currently the EEE standard is defined for 100 megabit and 1 gigabit hardware but could eventually expand into faster connections.

Will the new standard require a complete overhaul of your network? Because the EEE only applies to the physical layer of your network only, the only pieces of hardware that will need updating are the Network Interface Cards and Switches. Since Information Technology has historically been the biggest consumer of energy, EEE will clearly be a welcome addition in reducing ones total energy consumption.