Neem: Network Energy Efficiency Manager

The energy consumed by networks is growing and while it is not the dominant contributor to IT energy spend, the absolute power consumption numbers are staggeringly large. As servers and cooling within data centers and enterprises becomes more energy-efficient, it is critical that we address the energy management for networking devices now and make these devices energy efficient as well as energy proportional. Network device, topology and route control based on configurations, traffic demands and performance requirements can be leveraged for reducing network energy consumption. In this paper we present NEEM (Network Energy Efficiency Manager), a network energy management solution for automating the policy driven analysis for energy efficiency and implementing the network changes that can result in significant savings by adapting to the network traffic dynamics and requirements. Our initial results on an enterprise network, based on offline analysis show that NEEM can save over 30% of network energy consumption. NEEM is a vendor-neutral, standards-based solution.